Hastily-Formed Networks for First Responders

Abstract

First responders who participate in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions have many special requirements which are not common in normal civilian operations. These include the ability to get going with their mission with minimal infrastructure, tight-loop and frequent communication, light-weight equipment, ability to scale-up the team when needed, and finally, the longest-running and lightest power source for their equipment. We present a system called TwiddleNet, which harnesses the power of mobile devices, primarily smart phones, to enable 1) instant content capture and publish, 2) full owner control of content, and 3) search, view and download of content. TwiddleNet is most useful for first-responder networking and information sharing tasks which require immediate content capture and dissemination. TwiddleNet can be scaled up or down depending on the needs of the mission. The entire system can be run on handheld devices to support a small first-responder team, or on a mix of handheld devices and server-class computers to link together a large number of smartphones sharing images, music, videos and mobile-blogs. TwiddleNet is designed to support the first 48-72 hours of first responder missions. As a result, TwiddleNet assumes little infrastructure and provides sufficient redundancy to operate on alternate mechanisms.