Emergency Informing System Based on Ad hoc Networks

One current trend for providing delay-tolerant communications under highly-dynamic routing conditions is to form ad hoc OppNets with the exploitation of smart mobile devices carried by people. Modern smartphones hide a great potential for emergency monitoring and management: they are truly pervasive, they can establish peer-to-peer wireless links using short-range communication technologies, thus guaranteeing coverage even when fixed infrastructures are unavailable, they can define the location with high accuracy through several embedded sensors and send messages without global connectivity. The paper examines the possibility of creating a mobile ad hoc network based on smartphones running the iOS 10 operating system and higher in emergencies, providing that each smartphone is equipped with transmitters for working with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and GLONASS interfaces. To solve this problem, a transparent automatic system for selecting alternative communication channels is organized with the possibility of localizing neighboring reachable nodes to broadcast coordinates to them with further reporting the available information to the appropriate special (rescue) services. The article describes the mechanism of nodes' interaction based on the Multipeer Connectivity framework. With this framework and the Bonjour software module, giving a protocol for automatic detection of services, an emergency informing system has been developed. This system provides the ability to deploy ad hoc network without directly accessing the global network of each of its participants, to localize the emergency zone, and to send an SOS- message to all connected peers. If there were no peers in the current session, the broadcast is pushed back in time until any peer is connected to this session.