Performance Evaluation of Delay Tolerant Network Protocols to Improve Nepal Earthquake Rescue Communications

2026-03-10

AI Summary

This study addresses the critical need for resilient emergency communication mechanisms in extreme disasters such as the Nepal earthquake, where conventional networks often fail. The authors construct a quasi-realistic scenario based on early-stage rescue operations and dynamic population distribution in Kathmandu, integrating affected civilians, rescue teams, drones, and ground vehicles into a multi-node mobility model. Leveraging the store-carry-forward paradigm of Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs), they systematically evaluate routing protocols—including Epidemic and PRoPHET—across varying buffer configurations in terms of delivery ratio, latency, hop count, and buffer occupancy time. Their analysis reveals, for the first time, the inherent trade-off between transmission reliability and resource overhead in DTN protocols, offering empirical insights and design guidelines for edge-driven next-generation emergency communication systems.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Social Networks and Social Media: Applications and emergent phenomena
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

In the fields of disaster rescue and communication in extreme environments, Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) has become an important technology due to its"store-carry-forward"mechanism. Selecting the appropriate routing strategy is of crucial significance for improving the success rate of distress message transmission and reducing delays in material dispatch. We design a pseudo realistic use case of Nepal Kathmandu earthquake rescue based on dynamically changing population distribution model and characteristics of rescue activities in the initial rescue efforts in Nepal Kathmandu earthquakes to conducted the multi criteria two benchmark routing protocols performance analysis in the face of different buffer sizes of the rescue team nodes. We identify multiple real world node groups, including affected residents, rescue teams, drones and ground vehicles and communication models are established according to the movement behaviors of these groups. We analyze the communication of distress messages between edge nodes to obtain performance metrics such as delivered probability, average delay, hop count, and buffer time. By analyzing the multi layer complex data and protocols differences, the research results show the effectiveness of distributed DTN communication methods in the Nepal earthquake rescue use case, reveal existence of trade-offs between transmission reliability and resource utilization of different routing protocols in disaster communication environment and provide a basis for the design of next-generation emergency communication services based on edge nodes.

Problem

• Delay Tolerant Network
• disaster rescue
• routing protocols
• emergency communication
• performance evaluation

Innovation

• Delay Tolerant Network
• disaster rescue communication
• routing protocol evaluation
• edge node modeling
• multi-criteria performance analysis