Post-Disaster Communications: Enabling Technologies, Architectures, and
Open Challenges
Abstract
The number of disasters has increased over the past decade where these
calamities significantly affect the functionality of communication
networks. In the context of 6G, airborne and spaceborne networks offer
hope in disaster recovery to serve the underserved and to be resilient
in calamities. Therefore, this paper surveys the state-of-the-art
literature on post-disaster wireless communication networks and provides
insights for the future establishment of such networks. In particular,
we first give an overview of the works investigating the general
procedures and strategies for counteracting any large-scale disasters.
Then, we present the possible technological solutions for post-disaster
communications, such as the recovery of the terrestrial infrastructure,
installing aerial networks, and using spaceborne networks. Afterward, we
shed light on the technological aspects of post-disaster networks,
primarily the physical and networking issues. We present the literature
on channel modeling, coverage and capacity, radio resource management,
localization, and energy efficiency in the physical layer and discuss
the integrated space-air-ground architectures, routing,
delay-tolerant/software-defined networks, and edge computing in the
networking layer. This paper also presents interesting simulation
results which can provide practical guidelines about the deployment of
ad hoc network architectures in emergency scenarios. Finally, we present
several promising research directions, namely backhauling, placement
optimization of aerial base stations, and the mobility-related aspects
that come into play when deploying aerial networks, such as planning
their trajectories and the consequent handovers.