A middleware for service-oriented communication in mobile disaster response environments

Abstract

Today, the work of disaster response teams is being increasingly supported and coordinated by using portable computing devices. Connected to mobile ad-hoc networks, these devices establish a communication infrastructure immune to damages caused by natural disasters. However, ad-hoc networks are dynamic and volatile environments, which hampers hosting of critical applications relying on fast responsiveness. These difficulties can be mitigated to some extent at the middleware level. In this paper we present RESCUE, an open-source middleware for service-oriented communication in mobile disaster response environments. RESCUE has been designed to address challenges of dynamic ad-hoc networks for service discovery and invocation and provides an infrastructure for flexible mobile systems based on loosely coupled services.