A Socio-physical and Mobility-Aware Coalition Formation Mechanism in Public Safety Networks

In this paper, the problem of socio-physical and mobility-aware coalition formation among the trapped users and the first responders in public safety networks is addressed towards guaranteeing users’ connectivity, stability, and energy-efficient communication. Each user is associated with some social, physical and mobility-related characteristics and attributes in a public safety network. Users’ social attributes mainly refer to the communication interests with the neighbors based on their profiles and objectives, while their physical characteristics are the energy availability, the energy consumption rate and the average received signal strength from the neighbors for each user. The profile of each user is completed by a mobility pattern that characterizes the moving behavior of the specific user. Those types of characteristics are considered to constitute a weighted profile for each user, based on which the coalition-head selection and the coalition formation processes are performed in a distributed manner with reduced information exchange among the users. As the time evolves, given users’ mobility, the conditions in the public safety network change dynamically, thus a coalitions’ remedy methodology is introduced. Finally, the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated via modeling and simulation and its superiority compared to other existing approaches in the literature is illustrated.