Emergency Route Selection for D2D Cellular Communications During an Urban Terrorist Attack

Device-to-Device (D2D) communications is a technology that allows mobile users to relay information to each other, without access to the cellular network. In this paper, we consider how to dynamically select multi-hop routes for D2D communications in spectrum co-existence with a fully loaded cellular network. The modelling scenario is that of a real urban environment, when the cellular network is congested during an unexpected event, such as a terrorist attack. We use D2D to relay data across the urban terrain, in the presence of conventional cellular (CC) communications. We consider different wireless routing algorithms, namely: shortest-path-routing (SPR), interference-aware-routing (IAR), and broadcast-routing (BR). In general, there is a fundamental trade-off between D2D and CC outage performances, due to their mutual interference relationship. For different CC outage constraints and D2D end-to-end distances, the paper recommends different D2D routing strategies. The paper also considers the effects of varying user density and urban building material properties on overall D2D relaying feasibility. Over a distance of a kilometre, it was found that the success probability of D2D communications can reach 91% for a moderate participating user density (400 per square km) and a low wall penetration loss (<10dB).