A Multi-hop Walkie-Talkie-Like Emergency Communication System for Catastrophic Natural Disasters

When stricken by a catastrophic natural disaster, the efficiency of disaster response operation is very critical to life saving. However, communication systems, including cellular networks, were usually crashed due to various causes making the coordination among a large number of disorganized disaster response workers extremely difficult. Unfortunately, rapid deployment of many existing emergency communication systems relies on a good transportation system, which is usually not available in a catastrophic natural disaster. We designed a multi-hop walkie-talkie-like communication system based on P2Pnet platform, which is a MANET P2P network constructed using volunteers’ laptops. This system can support a large number of voluntary workers in the early hours of a catastrophic natural disaster when external assistance is blocked by the paralyzed transportation system. The multi-hop version can help to bypass the obstacles that block face-to-face communication as well as direct WiFi communication links. We wish to stimulate the research on the emergency communication systems that is inexpensive and easy to deploy for future catastrophic natural disasters.