A QoS enabled positioning, sensing, and communication system for first responders

In fire fighting having prompt and reliable tracking and communication in case of emergency is of paramount importance. We developed an integrated positioning, sensing and communication platform for tracking first responders in urban fire fighting. A Quality of Service (QoS) enabled TDMA MAC (QT-MAC) was designed to provide a low latency and high reliability service for critical data transfer, as well as localization, sensing and communication services. QT-MAC implements a combination of priority queuing and weighted fair queuing. Experiments in a typical office building environment show that QT-MAC is able to deliver high priority emergency data with guaranteed low delay under heavy network traffic load.