First Responders' Crystal Ball: How to Scry the Emergency from a Remote Vehicle

Successes and failures during rescue operations after hurricane Katrina and the Twin Towers attack demonstrated the importance of supporting first responders with adequate means to perform their operations in an effective and safe way. From a networking point of view, one of the main challenges is that of providing first responders with multimedia information about the emergency as soon as possible, even from a remote location. Think of an ambulance that is traveling toward a crisis area: providing paramedics with live video stream about the emergency while they are still driving would be of great help. Indeed, as if they were able to gaze into a crystal ball, paramedics could organize their actions even before actually being on the spot, thus becoming immediately operative as soon as they step out of their vehicle. To this aim, we designed an inter-vehicular communication system able to quickly discover and transmit real time multimedia information from around a crisis area to approaching first responders’ vehicles. As vehicular communications are highly variable in nature, we endowed our system with a transmission range estimator that is put to good use to reduce the number of hops that a video triggering message sent by a vehicle will experience to reach its destination. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our scheme in reducing the message delivery time and the traffic generated.