Continuous and Responsive D2D Victim Localization for Post-Disaster Emergencies

One of the most challenging tasks in a disaster scenario is the detection and localization of victims with high accuracy and minimum delay, especially in out-of-coverage areas. In the event of a disaster that disrupts the cellular network infrastructure, emergency calls can be relayed to the core network via multi-hop D2D communications. In this paper, a localization system is proposed that uses radio measurements obtained through such D2D multi-hop assisted emergency calls to localize in-coverage and out-of-coverage devices. To address the uncertainty and gradual reception of data in real-Time in this scenario, a dynamic constraint satisfaction-based Multi Victim Localization Algorithm (MVLA) is proposed. This algorithm locates multi-hop devices in a progressive propagation manner to provide fast and accurate updates on victim locations. Additionally, three modes of MV LA, namely MV LArecent, MV LAseq, and MV LAall are proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that MV LAall has a lower localization error compared to MV LArecent and MV LAseq.Moreover,MV LAall, is compared with an existing particle filtering-based localization algorithm called RSSI Monte-Carlo Boxed Localization (RSSI-MCL) under an increasing number of emergency user devices and functional gNodeBs. Results show that MV LAall significantly outperforms the RSSI-MCL method in terms of localization accuracy and computational delay.