Development of Rest Facility Information Exchange System by Utilizing Delay Tolerant Network

In this paper, we propose temporary rest facilities information exchange system among many people unable to get home by utilizing Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) after a disaster. When public transportation services are interrupted by the disaster, those people try to get home on foot while taking a rest at the facility. However, it is difficult for those people to obtain information of temporary rest facilities provided hurriedly, because communication infrastructures in the disaster area are disconnected by the disaster damage. Therefore, we propose a method to exchange the information among those people mutually by using mobile device via DTN for diffusion of the information. By using DTN, those people can communicate with each other by using mobile device and use the rest facility on the basis of the information even if the communication infrastructures are disconnected. Then, we develop mobile device application software to exchange the rest facility information among the people via DTN. In order to evaluate the application, we verified the communication performance in practical experiments. The experimental results showed the developed application had sufficient performance to exchange the information of the rest facility via DTN. Then, we verify the diffusivity of the rest facility information by a network simulation. The simulation results showed that the rest facility information was diffused widely and effectively to those people. Keywords—Delay Tolerant Network; rest facility; disaster; communication infrastructure; simulation