# Enhanced IoT-Based End-To-End Emergency and Disaster Relief System
## 1 Introduction  
According to the United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), the financial impact due to natural and man-made disasters is paramount. It is reported that by 2030, the global average of annual losses due to disasters is forecasted to increase and reach 415 billion USD [1]. These losses surely decrease when a preventive communication strategy is ready to be triggered in a disaster incident. Indeed, two recent crises showed how important communication alternatives could be during the disaster relief operations. (1) In March 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake caused a tsunami of 30 feet in Japan, the fourth-largest earthquake on record (since 1900), and six nuclear reactors in Fukushima Daiichi plant were affected (two pools of reactors exploded). Japan's Fire and Disaster Management Agency confirmed that 22,000 people are dead or missing. During the Fukushima disaster, emergency teams and the army were using classic High Frequency (HF) military radio communication without data transmission. Local taxi drivers were coordinating rescue operations using their on-board radio communication devices traditionally used for reservations. (2) In January 2010, Haiti earthquake, of a 7.0 magnitude, was another example of the use of Very High Frequency (VHF) radio communication and satellite phones. During the 24 h after the disaster, disaster task forces did not have a clear vision of the whole situation. Such catastrophes' relief operations are impossible to conduct without an alternative data communication system immediately deployable and operational. To that end, we have recently proposed a new routing protocol called Optimized Routing Approach for Critical and Emergency Networks (ORACE-Net) [2]. ORACE-Net is a multi-hop routing protocol, which rates every end-to-end link with regards to its quality (i.e., end-to-end link quality estimation). This metric varies according to the nodes' mobility, which is the most relevant criteria for reliable emergency systems. Our previous work [3] was constrained by the following factors: First, there were no real on-body sensors. We generated data for a fictitious network on the mobile nodes as the application layer payload. Second, the initial experimental results indicate that the average disconnections increase significantly when the end-to-end route has more than two hops. Third, as the achieved results were collected in an indoor scenario, several wireless devices were causing interference on the deployed network and consequently reducing the global network performance. Fourth, with reference to one of the most studied problem in network design, the Capacitated Network Design Problem (CNDP) detailed in [4] on the basis of the results in [5], we re-studied the number of deployed nodes with regards to the network traffic uncertainty. Indeed, eight nodes caused an overhead on the routing layer and made the routing process too slow and, consequently, the round trip time was high. Thus, we reduced the number of deployed tactical nodes to four. It is important to note here that this given number of tactical devices must be carefully selected according to the area dimensions. [PERSON] in [6] provides a complete study of the discrete network optimization problems, and [PERSON] et al. in [7] propose a heuristic that can be used to warm-start the solution process of the solver, accelerating the convergence towards the optimum. The latter proposed solution approach would be perfect for selecting the optimal number of tactical nodes considering traffic uncertainty in discrete network optimization problems. For small and medium-sized networks (up to 25 nodes), an analytical study given in [8] consists of a reference to converge to an optimized network design independently of the traffic uncertainty. Finally, according to the collected results, we were unable to evaluate the throughput accuracy due to the significant number of disconnections and high round trip time delay.