TeamPhone: Networking Smartphones for Disaster Recovery

TL;DR

TeamPhone is a system that networks smartphones using multiple wireless technologies to improve disaster recovery communications, enabling rescue coordination and survivor self-rescue with energy-efficient messaging and positioning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated smartphone networking system with messaging and self-rescue features, implemented on Android to enhance disaster recovery efforts.

Findings

Effective communication among rescue workers achieved

Survivor self-rescue groups can be formed and coordinated

System demonstrated to meet disaster recovery communication needs

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how to network smartphones for providing communications in disaster recovery. By bridging the gaps among different kinds of wireless networks, we have designed and implemented a system called TeamPhone, which provides smartphones the capabilities of communications in disaster recovery. Specifically, TeamPhone consists of two components: a messaging system and a self-rescue system. The messaging system integrates cellular networking, ad-hoc networking and opportunistic networking seamlessly, and enables communications among rescue workers. The self-rescue system groups, schedules and positions the smartphones of trapped survivors. Such a group of smartphones can cooperatively wake up and send out emergency messages in an energy-efficient manner with their location and position information so as to assist rescue operations. We have implemented TeamPhone as a prototype application on the Android platform and deployed it on off-the-shelf smartphones. Experimental results demonstrate that TeamPhone can properly fulfill communication requirements and greatly facilitate rescue operations in disaster recovery.