Towards Building Asset Registry in Emergency Response

This work proposes an algorithm for asset registry in emergency situations. Specifically, we take the view that first responders need to harvest the unknown capabilities of sensors in an area affected by an emergency. We show how a first responder can estimate the number of sensors with a desired sensing capability in an efficient fashion. At the heart of our algorithm is a simple probabilistic counting strategy. Our theoretical predictions were confirmed both by simulation and by implementation on IRIS sensor motes. Our theoretical and experimental results show that the error percentage of the capability collection is very low.