NICER911: Ad-hoc Communication and Emergency Services Using Networking Smartphones and Wireless Home Routers

ABSTRACTReliable communication and emergency services are crucial for the success of crisis response and management. However, today's emergency technologies used by rescuers and civilians mainly rely on either centralized or specialized approaches, which reveal individual issues in infrastructure-less crisis scenarios. In this paper, we propose an emergency communication system called NICER911 that uses ad-hoc device-to-device communications enabling efficient data exchanges and delay-tolerant networking. On top of that, we integrate three types of emergency services allowing cooperations between rescuers and civilians: a social network, rescue instructions, and a self-rescue system. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype to show the feasibility, resource efficiency, and ease of use by preliminary quantitative and qualitative evaluations.