Reliable low-energy group formation for infrastructure-less public safety networks

In this paper, we study an infrastructure-less public safety network (IPSN) where energy efficiency and reliability are critical requirements in the absence of cellular infrastructure, i.e., base stations and wired backbone lines. We formulate the IPSN group formation as a clustering problem. A subset of user equipments (UEs), called group owners (GOs), are chosen to serve as virtual base stations, and each non-GO UE, referred to as group member, is associated with a GO as its member. We propose a novel clustering algorithm in the framework of affinity propagation, which is a state-of-the-art message-passing technique with a graphical model approach developed in the machine learning field. Unlike conventional clustering approaches, the proposed clustering algorithm minimizes the total energy consumption while guaranteeing link reliability by adjusting the number of GOs. Simulation results verify that the IPSN optimized by the proposed clustering algorithm reduces the total energy consumption of the network by up to 31 % compared to the conventional clustering approaches.