E-Darwin2: A smartphone based disaster recovery network using WiFi tethering
Amitangshu Pal, Krishna Kant · 2018
Emergency communication networks are crucial for monitoring and providing assistance to affected people during long-persisting disasters. Given substantial and increasing penetration of smart-phones throughout the world, we envision future emergency networks to consist of smart-phones in the disaster area, un-failed portions of the cellular network, and the communication capabilities provided by the specially deployed emergency equipment (e.g., fixed and mobile wireless access points deployed on the ground or in air via helicopters, satellite radio interfaces, etc.). We envision the emergency network for bulk data transmission - such as transmitting multiple pictures/sounds captured by the phone to help with rescue/safety assessment while keeping the delay/energy expenditure minimum. With extensive simulations, we show that the proposed scheme forwards the sensed data to the control centers with small latency (<; 3 seconds) while keeping the WiFi radios on for less than 1% of time.