On Designing Communication Networks for Emergency Situations

Communication infrastructure has some specific requirements that need to be considered within the context of emergency response scenarios. A few examples are the reliability, robustness, and the ability to work with other existing technologies, namely the interoperability and compatibility of such implementations. There have been several examples of communication failures between different first responder organizations in different disaster scenarios. For example at the World Trade Center on 9/11 some of the police warnings were not heard by firefighters resulting in several lives lost [5]. To address this problem, we propose a Hybrid Wireless Mesh Network (HWMN) as a candidate for highly reliable communication infrastructure capable of working in a heterogeneous environment with different available backhaul technologies for Internet connectivity. Also, cellular technology, as a pre-existing infrastructure, can be taken advantage of when the service is available in an emergency situation. We are using cellular simulators to study the possibilities of integrating cellular systems with other systems to evacuate people more efficiently in case of emergency and present alternative routes to avoid traffic congestion.