A Walkie-Talkie-Like Emergency Communication System for Catastrophic Natural Disasters

When a catastrophic natural disaster strikes, an organized and effective rescue operation is essential to rescue those victims trapped under collapsed buildings or landslides as well as to relief massive survivals who lose their life support. However, communication systems were usually paralyzed by many causes. The loss of communication systems made rescue and relief operations extremely difficult costing many lives unnecessarily. We had proposed a MANET based emergency communication and information system, P2Pnet, which can support a large number of voluntary workers under catastrophic natural disasters. This paper demonstrates the design of a subsystem of P2Pnet, a walkie-talkie-like communication system, which can be used in the early hours or days after a natural disaster strikes. We wish to stimulate the research on the emergency communication systems that is inexpensive and easy to deploy for future catastrophic natural disasters.