Wireless Technologies for Emergency Response: A Comprehensive Review and Some Guidelines

Disaster situations require a prompt emergency response. The failure of the legacy (wired) emergency response systems to efficiently cope in such time-critical environments has led to a great interest in wireless-based emergency response systems. In this regard, a number of wireless technologies and systems - each with its peculiar characteristics and pros and cons - have been proposed for use in various emergency response situations. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive survey of the research on this practically important topic. We motivate the use of wireless technology for emergency response and present a comparative analysis of the available wireless technologies. After outlining the scope and requirements of emergency response systems, we provide an overview of the architectures and features of wireless-based emergency response systems and then compare different wireless technologies for different emergency settings. We provide not only details about individual emergency response systems and technologies but also expend efforts to show the forest for the trees to emergency response practitioners - in particular, we provide general high-level guidelines that can help in deciding the right technology for a particular situation, and discuss potential pitfalls from the large-scale emergency-network deployment experience of one of the authors. The emergency response operation is split into five functionalities: we present general guidelines that would help public safety agencies in choosing suitable wireless technologies for each one of them. Finally, we also highlight opportunities and identify the potential areas for further investigation.