title: Achieving reliable communication in dynamic emergency responses.
abstract: Emergency responses require the coordination of first responders to assess the condition of victims, stabilize their condition, and transport them to hospitals based on the severity of their injuries. WIISARD is a system designed to facilitate the collection of medical information and its reliable dissemination during emergency responses. A key challenge in WIISARD is to deliver data with high reliability as first responders move and operate in a dynamic radio environment fraught with frequent network disconnections. The initial WIISARD system employed a client-server architecture and an ad-hoc routing protocol was used to exchange data. The system had low reliability when deployed during emergency drills. In this paper, we identify the underlying causes of unreliability and propose a novel peer-to-peer architecture that in combination with a gossip-based communication protocol achieves high reliability. Empirical studies show that compared to the initial WIISARD system, the redesigned system improves reliability by as much as 37% while reducing the number of transmitted packets by 23%.
authors.affiliation: University of California, San Diego, USA.
authors.forename: Octav
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Chipara
authors.forename: Anders N
authors.initials: AN
authors.lastname: Plymoth
authors.forename: Fang
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.forename: Ricky
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: Brian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Evans
authors.forename: Per
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Johansson
authors.forename: Ramesh
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Rao
authors.forename: William G
authors.initials: WG
authors.lastname: Griswold
mesh_terms: D004189:Disaster Planning; D004190:Disasters; D004631:Emergency Medical Service Communication Systems; D004632:Emergency Medical Services / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D018635:Rescue Work / Q000458:organization & administration; D059015:Wireless Technology