36 Proc. of the Second Intl. Conf. on Advances In Computing, Communication and Information Technology- CCIT 2014. Copyright © Institute of Research Engineers and Doctors, USA .All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-63248-051-4 doi: 10.15224/ 978-1-63248-051-4-23 WiMAX Quality of Service Deployment in Disaster Management [Juwita Mohd Sultan, Garik Markarian, Phillip Benachour] Abstract—There are five different Quality of Service (QoS) classes defined by the IEEE 802.16e-2005: UGS, ertPS, rtPS, nrtPS and BE. It is well known that BE provides the lowest level of quality compared all other classes. In this paper, we investigate the performance of rtPS and BE QoS classes in an emergency and natural disaster scenario. We use the OPNET modeler for simulation purposes in order to evaluate rtPS and BE performance with particular focus on video conferencing/streaming and web browsing applications. It is possible that during a disaster BE is the only available service. Simulation results revealed that in certain situations, a user with BE QoS could provide higher throughput compared to the rtPS case. Consequently, we also evaluate the video conferencing/streaming application for the BE QoS case. Simulation results show that for a defined maximum number of users in the network and a certain combination of users that are allocated a QoS and a selected application e.g., web browsing or video conferencing, BE is shown to demonstrate a higher throughput than rtPS. The simulation results are discussed in the main body of the paper. Keywords—QoS,BE, rtPS, throughput. I. Introduction In many practical applications or situations where emergency communication is required, very often where the major communication is down such as Long Term Evolution (LTE). It also happened during times of catastrophe such as earthquakes or tsunamis, when the entire incumbent communications infrastructure been destroyed or damaged. An ad-hoc communications system that requires relatively fast and robust links must be deployed in a very short time to support the communication needs of the rescue and recovery operations. Therefore in this particular scenario, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) appears to be a viable solution. WiMAX network can be deployed in the risk and inaccessible areas for example in the place where the disaster happened (earthquake, seaquake, flooding, and forest fires) and even in the proximity of a possible hazard such as volcanoes and nuclear power stations [1]. Hence, communication infrastructure that needs to be fast and easily deployed plays a paramount role insuporting communications among the emergency response personnel, disparate agencies and the outside world. Juwita Mohd Sultan, Garik Markarian, Phillip Benachour School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, Lancashire, United Kingdom. Nowadays modern disaster response often requires the transmission of a variety of information such as texts, voices, videos and other types of data. The selection of WiMAX-based communication architecture is the best solution due to its capabilities in terms of coverage, data rates, user mobility and even enables meeting different QoS constraints in relation to different types of applications and traffic. In particular, in the case of an emergency communications system, it is possible to allocate network resources properly to assign priority to critical applications, such as real-time applications. This is impossible in the case of basic WiFi systems that assign to all services the same level of QoS [2]. Fig. 1 shows architecture for an efficient disaster management system. People at the operation site communicate with each other using cellular phones, notebooks, PDAs or any communication tools and transfer all the information to the Monitoring Centre. Figure 1. Architecture of a disaster management system [1] Continuing from our previous project [3], research was done to map the best quality of service for hybrid network (WiFi+WiMAX and WiFi+LTE) and analyse the performance for the rtps and BE QoS users. However, in this project for simulation purposes we have selected WiMAX network for testing these initial results because it has a private network which would be easy to implement the result rather than going to LTE which needs large scale deployment. Therefore we believe if these results are working for WIMAX, we also believe the same approach can be used on LTE network.