Performance analysis of LDPC coded wireless ad-hoc network for emergency response communications

In this paper, we present the performance evaluation of coded wireless ad-hoc network for emergency response communication. Due to the limited transmission range, a number of intermediate relaying nodes may exist between source and destination and these convey source transmission using hybrid Amplify-and-forward (AF)/Decode-and-forward (DF) protocol. All nodes contain single antenna and OFDM based Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) coded transmission is considered over Rician fading channel. The closed form bit-error-rate (BER) expression has been deduced for the proposed system. Performance evaluation reveals that BER of the LDPC coded ad-hoc network is better than that of non-coded ad-hoc network.

I. Introduction

Disaster is a calamitous phenomenon that may cause significant damages such as loss of life, collapse infrastructure and drastic change to the environment. There are many types of catastrophic disasters, such as earthquake, hurricane, typhoon, tsunami, high rise building collapse which imposes an over-present challenge to public emergency support team almost every year [1]. Both the frequency and intensity of different kind of disasters will rise over the coming decade because of industrialization, urbanization and the generation of green house gases (GHG). It is a great challenge for the emergency response team to cope up with the post disaster situation. Thus emergency or crisis management after natural disaster requires coordination and efficient communication among responders, public emergency support teams and community resources. If traditional land-line or wireless communication infrastructure collapsed, infrastructureless on demand ad-hoc networks can provide required communication services to the responder for exchanging emergency information.