Evaluating Performance Characteristic of Opportunistic Routing Protocols: A Case Study of the 2016 Italian League Match Earthquake in the Stadio Adriatico
This study addresses communication challenges for emergency responders during disasters, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new scenario.
The paper evaluated opportunistic routing protocols in a disaster scenario based on the 2016 Italian earthquake, finding that Spray and Wait achieved higher delivery probability with reduced overhead compared to Epidemic.
Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) can provide emergency communication support when conventional infrastructure is disrupted during disasters. This paper evaluates the performance of opportunistic routing protocols in a realistic disaster scenario based on the 2016 Central Italy earthquake, modelled as an emergency occurring during a football match at Stadio Adriatico in Pescara. We identify multiple suitable groups of mobile and static nodes, such as audiences, a range of different emergency responders, stage sensors, and vehicles, to design and build evacuation and rescue activities in a partially connected environment. Two representative DTN routing protocols, Epidemic and Spray and Wait, are tested under identical simulation settings and compared using delivery probability, latency, overhead ratio, hop count and dropped messages. The results highlight that Spray and Wait provides a better balance between reliability and efficiency in this scenario, achieving higher delivery probability while reducing overhead and using network resources more efficiently. The study shows the usefulness of DTN simulation for analysing disaster communication performance in emergency response scenarios.