Reliable Data Replication in a Wireless Medical Emergency Network

Abstract

Medical teams dealing with major accidents have an acute need to gather and share information about casualties. The paper describes how hand-held computers linked together in a wireless network can address this problem, discussing in particular how to achieve the high degree of reliability that is an essential pre-requisite for practical use in an emergency situation. The main focus is on the problem of how to achieve reliable data replication between nodes in a network that is established in a hurry, where radio links are likely to suffer intermittent failures and where the network topology can grow, shrink and change dynamically. The paper argues that off-the-shelf commercial database solutions are not suitable, and describes the design and operation of a novel approach we have implemented in a prototype.