A-FC: An Activity-Based Delay Tolerant Routing Protocol for Improving Future School Campus Emergency Communications

2026-01-01

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of ensuring reliable emergency communication in campus disaster scenarios where conventional Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN) protocols suffer from high latency and low delivery rates due to network partitioning. To overcome these limitations, the authors propose an Activity-based First Contact (A-FC) routing protocol that integrates real-world social roles with node activity levels to identify highly active “faculty/staff nodes” and incorporates a forced upload mechanism. Evaluated on a realistic campus topology derived from Fuzhou No.1 High School, the proposed approach achieves a message delivery ratio of 68%, reduces average delay to 4,311 seconds, and maintains an average hop count of only 1.68—significantly outperforming traditional contact-driven protocols and offering an efficient, reliable backup solution for disaster-responsive communications.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Social Networks and Social Media: Analysis of web-mediated communications, communities, and crowds
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

School Campus emergency communication systems are vital for safeguarding student safety during sudden disasters such as typhoons, which frequently cause widespread paralysis of communication infrastructure. Traditional Delay-Tolerant Network (DTN) protocols, such as Direct Delivery and First Contact, struggle to maintain reliable connections in such scenarios due to high latency and low delivery rates. This paper proposes the Activity-based First Contact (A-FC) protocol, an innovative routing scheme that leverages real-world social roles to overcome network partitioning by mandatorily uploading messages to highly active"staff nodes". We constructed a real-world evaluation scenario based on the topology of Fuzhou No. 1 Middle School. Simulation results demonstrate that the A-FC protocol significantly outperforms baseline protocols, achieving approximately 68% message delivery probability and reducing average delay to 4311 seconds. With an average hop count of merely 1.68, this protocol establishes a low-cost, highly reliable backup communication model for school campus disaster response.

Problem

• Delay-Tolerant Network
• Emergency Communication
• School Campus
• Network Partitioning
• Message Delivery

Innovation

• Delay-Tolerant Networking
• Activity-based Routing
• Emergency Communication
• Social Role Awareness
• Message Delivery Optimization