Monitoring radiological incidents through an opportunistic network

Abstract

In case of radiological incidents before to send a human team to the site would be better have real time information about the situation that rescue teams can find. In this paper we simulate an opportunistic network over the nuclear plant of Ascó, in Tarragona, Spain to provide network connectivity and resource utilization to the rescue teams supposing a highly partitioned ad-hoc network. The system consists of distributed sensors in charge of collecting radiological data and ground vehicles that are sent to the nuclear plant at the moment of the accident to sense environmental and radiological information. Afterwards, data would be analyzed in the control center. Sensed data would be delivered to a control center using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) as a carrier. This research use opportunistically not only communication but also sensing, storage, etc. We analyze the pair wise contacts involved in our architecture, as well as visiting times, data collection, capacity of the links, size of the transmission window of the sensors, etc. Based on this information, we propose a transmission protocol with data control. Finally, we implemented an interface through which the control center can modify the UAV flight plan in order to get the highest quantity of data from sensors and ground vehicles and at the same time maximizing the ground sensed data.