Shadow phone: Context aware device replication for disaster management

Traditional disaster warning systems provide general information of disaster events and broadcast to all people. This simple approach adopts one-way communication model in which information is always transferred in a single direction from server-side to client-side. However, for better support of disaster warning and rescue, the system is supposed to leverage informative content by producing user-context dependent information. Mobile computing devices are portable and equipped with heterogeneous sensors and are able to provide many information collected by these sensors. With the collected information, the disaster management system can instruct the users to get away from the disaster. To achieve this idea, the system requires lots of computing power to customize information to meet demands of large-numbers of users, therefore, cloud computing is the key technology that contributes to the idea implementation. In this work, we propose two important features: (1) context-aware transmission policy which controls how to transmit data efficiently according to data priority, battery level and network data rate; (2) an architecture that supports the model of mobile interactive applications in which clients and servers can interact with each other in an autonomic manner.