Use of Infrastructure-Less Network Architecture for Crowd Sourcing and Periodic Report Generation in Post Disaster Scenario

Abstract

Due to the damage of existing network infrastructure (Internet, GSM, etc.) in any post-disaster scenario, it is difficult to assess the damage as well as the demands of the victims trapped at various regions. Due to the crisis of real time communication, victims as well as the rescue team could not fulfill the actual requirement and therefore unable to decide their functionality at any particular point of time. Due to lack of timely genuine situational information, it is quite challenging for any relief or rescue team to assess the exact requirement/damages of affected regions. Many times it has been observed that the distribution of relief materials at different sites did not match with the actual demands, due to adhoc distribution of recourses. As a consequence, in some areas limited amount of relief materials had been sent irrespective of assessing the actual damage. To dealt with these issues, using a subset of existing network architecture an adhoc multi-hop communication system has been designed. A set of applications have been developed on top of it, where victims (mobile nodes) can generate situational information of any affected region regarding to the casualty or need at any particular point of time through a light weight android application. The generated messages will be transferred seamlessly to other mobile nodes on contact. Finally, those messages would be dumped in a master storage box (MSB). As a result, in MSB the information is processed using background applications to wipe out redundancy and inconsistencies. A number of reports could be generated regarding the resource needs of different sites for effective need assessment and resource allocation by the relief organizations at the early stage of any disaster. The proposed group of applications have been tested for a large volume of dummy crowd-sourced data for quality evaluation.