Abstract-Situation awareness in emergency response is critical. Knowing the status of the hazards, the rescue workers, and the building occupants can help the incident commander responding to emergencies in taking the right decisions which can save lives. Such situation awareness can be achieved by using the building sensing and communications infrastructures as well as having the rescue workers deploy their own. Current sensing and communications techniques are, nonetheless, not fault-free. In this paper we study, both in the lab and during emergency response drills, the nature of the different wireless networks, namely sensor networks and Wi-Fi networks, when transmitting different types of data. Based on our findings, we propose a series of practical and novel techniques that exploit the availability of different networks, the rescue workers' mobility, and the possibility of having rescue teams carry more than one sensor of the same type which increases the reliability factors highly in practice.
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