Sustaining the Emergency Wireless Infrastructures With Differentiation-Landscape Based Energy Provisioning

With the advancements in information technology, our daily lives increasingly rely on the robustness and reliability of the information infrastructure. However, emergencies such as natural disasters may cause temporary disruptions to this infrastructure, resulting in the temporary loss of information functionality. It is an important issue for the emergency networks to sustain their information services when the conventional information services fail to operate. An Emergency Wireless Infrastructure (EWI)consists of flexibly deployed wireless routers to support the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart cities. Although advances in green and renewable energy resources have improve the long-term operation of EWI, intermittent availability of these green energy resources, such as solar energy, poses significant challenges during emergency periods and off-charging period. To address this issue, a thorough analysis of network-wide matching between energy resources and energy-consuming activities is essential for ensuring network sustainability. This paper studies the energy provisioning to an EWI with an aim to improve the sustainability of EWI. In order to qualitatively identify the difference of network activities among BSs we examine the differentiation of activity and energy consumption at BSs, taking account of both topological structure and the global activity at wireless routers called EWI base stations (BSs). By analysing the difference of network activity among BSs, a method of energy provisioning is proposed based on the differentiation landscape in terms of the topological positions of BSs and the connectivity between BSs. The proposed method enhances the sustainability of an EWI by enabling network-wide matching between energy requirement and provision. Moreover, the proposed method demonstrates high accuracy in estimating the energy-consumption differentiation in an EWI compared to other alternative methods.