Practical experiences in enabling and ensuring quality sensing in emergency response applications

Situational awareness in emergency response is critical. Knowing the status of the hazards, the rescue workers, and the building occupants, etc., can greatly help the incident commander make the right decisions in responding emergencies, and as a result, save lives. Such situational awareness can be achieved by using existing sensing and communication infrastructures and/or having rescue practitioners dynamically deploy their own. Nevertheless, current sensing and communications techniques are, not fault-free. In this paper, we study, through both lab experiments and real emergency response drills, the nature of different wireless networks (sensor networks and Wi-Fi networks) in transmitting various types of data. Based on our findings, we propose a series of practical techniques that potentially enhances the reliability of data delivery over heterogeneous wireless networks, by exploiting the availability of multiple networks, the rescue workers' mobility, and the possibility of having rescue teams carry redundant sensors.