COMVIVOR: An Evolutionary Communication Framework Based on Survivors’ Devices Reuse

Mobile devices currently available on the market have a plethora of features and enough computing power to make them, at the same time, information consumers, forwarders and producers. Since they are also provided with a set of sensors and usually battery operating, they are perfect candidates to devise a network infrastructure tailored to function during disruptive events. When everything else fails, they could autonomously reorganize and provide to the civilians and rescue teams valuable services and information. In this paper we adapt and enhance a previous designed framework, capable to epidemically diffuse the proper software updates to its nodes, in order to deploy any kind of service as a prompt response to the needs raised in emergency situations. We further propose and integrate a new smart positioning strategy, to speed up the diffusion of software updates by also keeping under control the overall network overhead. The achieved results show the feasibility of our proposal and how the dynamics of diffusion are enhanced by the smart positioning algorithm.