Emergency Device-to-Device Communication: Applicability, Case Studies and Interference Mitigation

This chapter focuses on the primary attributes of device-to-device (D2D) communications for emergency and rescue services. It highlights the salient features of D2D communications infrastructure which makes it an essential paradigm to support critical and emergency communication services. D2D communications offer a robust and scalable solution in disasters. In disasters, network load significantly increases and even with fully functional networks, the system is overloaded and overhead becomes too significant. D2D communications are used to establish emergency communication alone by incorporating several improvements in coverage. The chapter presents the case studies to highlight the potential of D2D communication infrastructure in natural disasters and catastrophes and discusses suitable interference mitigation techniques. It considers the usability of various interference mitigation techniques including power control, frequency allocation, time division multiplexing, adjacent channel interference cancelation, and multiple input multiple output systems in these scenarios.