Real-time visual communication to aid disaster recovery in a multi-segment hybrid wireless networking system

Abstract

When natural disasters or other large-scale incidents occur, obtaining accurate and timely information on the developing situation is vital to effective disaster recovery operations. High-quality video streams and high-resolution images, if available in real time, would provide an invaluable source of current situation reports to the incident management team. Meanwhile, a disaster often causes significant damage to the communications infrastructure. Therefore, another essential requirement for disaster management is the ability to rapidly deploy a flexible incident area communication network. Such a network would facilitate the transmission of real-time video streams and still images from the disrupted area to remote command and control locations.In this paper, a comprehensive end-to-end video/image transmission system between an incident area and a remote control centre is proposed and implemented, and its performance is experimentally investigated. In this study a hybrid multi-segment communication network is designed that seamlessly integrates terrestrial wireless mesh networks (WMNs), distributed wireless visual sensor networks, an airborne platform with video camera balloons, and a Digital Video Broadcasting-Satellite (DVB-S) system.By carefully integrating all of these rapidly deployable, interworking and collaborative networking technologies, we can fully exploit the joint benefits provided by WMNs, WSNs, balloon camera networks and DVB-S for real-time video streaming and image delivery in emergency situations among the disaster hit area, the remote control centre and the rescue teams in the field. The whole proposed system is implemented in a proven simulator. Through extensive simulations, the real-time visual communication performance of this integrated system has been numerically evaluated, towards a more in-depth understanding in supporting high-quality visual communications in such a demanding context.

Power aware routing algorithms (PARA) in wireless mesh networks for emergency management

“…A number of research questions have been raised regarding mesh nodes’ power levels “[ 9 ]”, stable path selection “[ 6 ]”, safe backup routing and optimal paths with power stability. Furthermore, several future research issues have been identified, including their throughput, capacity, scalability, security, traffic congestion in smart cities “[ 10 ]” network integration “[ 11 ]” and their use in public safety communication “[ 12 ]”.…”

NEARMesh: Network environment aware routing in a Wireless Mesh Network for emergency-response

“…Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) [3] have acquired increasing momentum as a practical networking concept to restore communications instantly and cost-efficiently for emergency/disaster management. Despite the advances in the design and deployment of WMNs [4][5] a number of research questions remain unresolved. Network routing performance is a key performance objective of an emergency response network, in order to guarantee the network connectivity until the infrastructure is restored [5].…”