Resilient and Reliable Communication for First Responders with Ad Hoc Network and MPTCP

Abstract

In severe hazardous situations, reliable network communication is an important infrastructure for conveying vital real-time information from sensors embedded in first responders. Important communications and emergency information must be received quickly to make critical decisions, improve situation awareness, and save lives. It is always challenging to ensure that the network is continuously available. To ensure seamless, fault-tolerant, and secure communication, we propose a new communication system: Next-Generation First Responder Communication Hubs (NGFR Communication Hubs). In this novel architecture, we improve the reliability of our communication networks using Multi-Path TCP (MPTCP), Optimized Linked State Routing Protocol (OLSR), and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) for portable devices and cloud services. MPTCP enables rapid recovery when a TCP connection fails while maintaining an end-to-end connection feature. OLSR, as a proactive routing protocol in Ad Hoc networks, provides an infrastructure-less architecture in MANET. MQTT enables efficient transmission of sensor data. We also give solutions on solving the dynamic gateway switch problem in the OLSR network by utilizing a TCP Fast Open packet. We have implemented the above reliable communication hub and conducted extensive experiments in different configurations. The results show that our proposed architecture can be quickly deployed and provides the reliability of the communication network despite the failure of some network infrastructures.