A Reliable Wireless Mesh Infrastructure Deployment at Crisis Site

emergency communication infrastructure should allow fast and reliable information dissemination to assist community and ease mitigation activities. Failure in communication networks and information exchange in past has impeded the responders' efforts resulting in huge loss of lives and economical impacts. Reliability, quick reconfiguration and interoperability are specific requirements of a robust communication infrastructure at disaster sites. We have deployed a wireless mesh test bed at several drills on campus and in the city to identify the vulnerabilities of the existing communication infrastructure and enhance the network capacity and performance. We present the real measurements obtained over the deployment of the wireless mesh test bed at disaster site followed by an analytical discussion of the important observations concerning the factors that impact performance or cause network congestion.