Belinda Braunstein, Troy Trimble, Rajesh Mishra, B.S. Manoj, Leslie Lenert, & Ramesh R. Rao. (2006). Challenges in using of distributed wireless mesh networks in emergency response. In M. T. B. Van de Walle (Ed.), Proceedings of ISCRAM 2006 – 3rd International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 30–38). Newark, NJ: Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium.
Abstract: Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are formed by self-organized wireless nodes that use multi-hop wireless relaying. These networks are useable in a variety of situations ranging from fixed residential broadband networking based on rooftop wireless mesh nodes to emergency response networks for handling large scale disasters. Quick deployability, minimal configuration, broadband communication, and easiness of reconfigurability are the major characteristics that make WMNs a suitable choice for emergency applications. There exist several open research issues in using such WMNs for emergency response applications. We, in this paper, present a hybrid distributed wireless networking architecture, Extreme Networking System (ENS), and present large set of performance observations collected from a real distributed hybrid wireless mesh network used for supporting a medical emergency response application. We present the traffic behavior observed in our network when a client server medical emergency response application is employed. The performance observations on real-traffic scenarios for emergency response application underlines the need for focusing further research on topology control, reliability, service availability, and distributed management. We observed that though there are several challenges that need to be solved, a WMN is a favorable choice for emergency response networking.
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