Are IEEE 802 Wireless Technologies Suited for Fire Fighters?

Ad hoc networks are considered to provide flexible and robust communication in emergency scenarios like fire fighting. However, for the time being, it is not clear how existing digital wireless communication technologies perform in environments with fire, smoke and vapour. To investigate this issue, we carried out several experiments at the training facilities of the Paris fire brigade. Our goal was to evaluate the performance of standard wireless communication systems in a real fire fighting scenario. The main result is that wireless communication is not affected much by fire and smoke but is indeed affected by vapour. Technologies operating in the 2.4 GHz frequency achieve a higher communication range than those with 5 GHz in our setup.