CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Several initiatives propose the use of opportunistic networksand heterogeneous devices to help overcome the communication and coordinationlimitations evidenced during first response activities in disasterrelief scenarios. These solutions tend to create an Internet of Thingsecosystem in which most components are mobile, autonomous and interactwith other in a loosely-coupled fashion. Regardless the benefitsprovided by these infrastructures, the message delivery on them doesnot consider time constraints. This aspect is particularly relevant in thisscenario since the time to conduct the first response activities is quiteshort, therefore they must be done quickly and coordinately. Trying tohelp address this challenge, this paper proposes a message propagationmodel for opportunistic networks that considers heterogeneous devicesand guarantees the real-time behavior of the network by bounding themaximum delay for messages transmission. The message propagation ismodeled using an analytical approach. Two different scheduling policiesare used to analyze the model and their feasibility conditions are proved.A case study based on a real disaster scenario is presented to illustratehow the proposed message dissemination model could have helped improvethe communication support in the field, and thus reduce the impactof the event.