Towards Distributed Geolocation for Large Scale Disaster Management

In the aftermath of major disasters such as earthquakes, locating individuals is crucial for passing on vital information, for example warnings and safety announcements. However, large scale disasters cause extensive damage to the network infrastructures and a generalized loss of communications in the chaos that ensues. This position paper presents a preliminary study for a geolocation service that relies on inter-device connections: mobile devices exchange positions of previously encountered devices when they come into contact. Every device thus builds a partial map of device locations and can use it to enforce geographic routing protocols that are resilient to large scale disasters.