On the Connectivity of a Mobile Ad-Hoc Network for Forest Firefighters
Orangel Azuaje, Ana Aguiar · 2018
Firefighters often operate in remote areas where there is little to no cellular coverage. In that context, a Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) among a firefighter team would provide a communication infrastructure, e.g., for monitoring, early warnings and basic communication. In this paper, we analyse trajectories simultaneously collected from a firefighter team during a controlled fire exercise, showing that the distance among any two firefighters only rarely exceeds 300~m. We assess connectivity using 802.11g links, which we argue to be a viable commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology. Results show a probability of being connected to another firefighter larger than 80%, although a few disconnection periods of more than 5 minutes may occur. Finally, we show that the Raspberry Pi (RPi) could be an inexpensive, power-feasible platform to deploy such a network for testing upper layer protocols and applications.