Ad Hoc Communications for Emergency Conditions

We developed an adaptive architecture for ad hoc communications to be used in emergency conditions. Emergencies could be caused by natural or man made disasters. Such events are difficult to predict. Therefore, their situations are accompanied by uncertainty. The experiences of various emergency situations and the related research strongly indicate that reliable and robust communications could facilitate the very needed flow of information, and consequently help to reduce risk in decision making in emergency situations. Our architecture includes a broadcast and a routing protocol that can self adapt to network conditions. We propose that cell phones in ad hoc mode are the ideal nodes to be used in our architecture. Cell phones are already ubiquitous and offer multiple interfaces, including ad hoc ones. We show that various combinations of our protocols provide the needed flexibility in emergency conditions.