Delay-Tolerant Networking for Tsunami Evacuation on the Small Island of Hachijojima: A Study of Epidemic and Prophet Routing

2025-12-31

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of supporting emergency evacuation decision-making in tsunami-affected areas where conventional communication infrastructure is compromised. Focusing on Hachijō Island, Japan, as a case study, the authors propose a mobile device-based delay-tolerant network (DTN) that leverages Epidemic and PROPHET routing protocols to enable infrastructure-free, opportunistic message dissemination. By modeling realistic human mobility and contact patterns during actual evacuation scenarios and employing a multi-criteria evaluation framework, the research systematically assesses the performance and suitability of both protocols under extreme emergency conditions. The findings demonstrate that such DTN-based approaches offer a viable and scalable solution for maintaining critical information flow in isolated regions—such as remote islands—during disasters when traditional networks fail.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization

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
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems

Abstract

Tsunami disasters pose a serious and recurring threat to coastal and island communities. When a large earthquake occurs, people are forced to make evacuation decisions under extreme time pressure, often at the same time as the communication infrastructure is damaged or completely lost. In such circumstances, the familiar channels for sharing information - cellular networks, the internet, and even landlines - can no longer be relied upon. What typically remains are the mobile devices that evacuees carry with them. These devices can form Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs), in which messages are forwarded opportunistically whenever people come into contact. To explore this, we evaluate multi-criteria performance characteristics of two DTN routing schemes in a pre-tsunami evacuation scenario for the island of Hachijojima, Japan use case.

Problem

• Delay-Tolerant Networking
• Tsunami Evacuation
• Communication Infrastructure Failure
• Opportunistic Communication
• Disaster Response

Innovation

• Delay-Tolerant Networking
• Tsunami Evacuation
• Opportunistic Routing
• Epidemic Routing
• PROPHET Routing