Supporting collaborative emergency response system with reputation-based trust peer-to-peer file sharing

Assessing information quickly and accurately in order to respond in any emergency situations is vital. This paper proposes an approach to provide information exchange in the emergency situation. We propose a scheme focusing on information collection and distribution between heterogeneous organizations who involved in the emergency response system. Our scheme uses peer-to-peer concept in order to support better coordination and cooperation. P2P file sharing works when a peer initiates request to other peers and responds to incoming request from other peers on the network. Thus, it suits an emergency situation where information exchange is urgent and should be delivered fast. However, the decentralized and anonymous characteristics of P2P environments make the task of information sharing and peers´ access controlling more difficult. Our approach employs reputation-based trust management P2P file sharing to distinguish good file providers in order to ensure the quality of file sharing between peers and minimize time wasting of downloading poor file quality. We believe that by implementing our proposed approach, the complexity of the problem during emergency response situation could be handled efficiently. This is because our proposed approach not only facilitates information sharing in emergency situation, but also enables efficient process of resource allocation and management in hierarchical manner. In this paper we also illustrate the mechanisms of file discovery, file exchange, and peers allocation in an emergency response situation.