Hierarchical Cloud-Fog Platform for Communication in Disaster Incident Coordination

Communication and coordination in a mass casualty disaster scenario is limited and difficult for medical personnel in the absence of necessary communication infrastructure and technologies that enable situation awareness. This leads to misdirected and delayed triage of scene-wide critically injured patients, especially when there are large numbers of patients needing diverse care levels. A hierarchical cloud-fog setup involving a core cloud and edge clouds (i.e., fogs) can help the patient triage related real-time data movement challenges. It can create visual situational awareness and overcome infrastructure limitations at the wireless network edge. In this paper, we describe our “Panacea's Cloud”, a hierarchical cloud-fog platform that provides augmented reality benefits with real-time human communication and geolocation services through the integration of a standardized Incident Command System (ICS) with smart devices such as heads-up displays, virtual beacons, and wireless mesh network elements. We show how the ICS can run using a core cloud as an intelligent dashboard that leverages fog resources and data collection close to the incident scenes. In addition, we describe experiment results from evaluations of Panacea's Cloud dashboard usability and platform performance that show benefits and issues in hierarchical cloud-fog service management in support of ICS communication during disaster incident coordination.