A Disaster Information System by Ballooned Wireless Adhoc Network

Natural disasters such as earthquake, tsunami, typhoon and hurricane in addition to annual disaster have frequently happened at many places around the world. Once disaster happened, communication network and information system are seriously damaged and communication means for residents cannot be used in the disaster area. Therefore, it is required to prepare emergency network system which can be quickly reconstructed to recover from the network failure and used to confirm resident's safety and damaged area information. In this paper, a ballooned wireless adhoc network is proposed to promptly insure communication means to grasp the information with disaster area, resident's safety and relief goods on the occurrence of disaster. By combining multiple ballooned wireless network nodes, a large adhoc network is organized in the sky on the disaster area and can cover shelters or interrupted communication area as urgent communication means. The system configuration and its function are described. A prototype system is constructed to evaluate its function and performance through several disaster applications such as wlide area disaster information and sharing system(WIDIS), VoIP, and omni-directional video surveillance system.