UCLA tests mobile network for first responders

It never rains in Southern California, but there are plenty of other disasters — natural and otherwise — for local first responders to deal with. Yet the Los Angeles and San Diego regions are among the most sprawling and bureacratically complex in the country, and interoperability problems are only compounded by massive traffic jams that can turn a five minute drive to the hospital to a two hour swelter. Now wonder, then, that local academics are trying to improve emergency operations. Consider as an example two computer scientists at UCLA, Mario Gerla and Giovanni Pau, who are hard at work creating a wireless, mobile ad-hoc networking platform (MANET) intended for use by firefighters and EMS services.

The MANET platform allows moving vehicles within a range of 100 to 300 meters of each other to connect and, car by car, create a network with a wide range. As cars fall out of range and drop out of the network, other node-equipped cars can join in to receive or send signals. “We use standard radio protocols such as Digital Short Range Communication combined with wireless LAN technology,” said Pau. “These devices can gather safety-related information, as well as other complex multimedia data, such as video.” Key to the effort is that it is not subject to the memory, processing, storage, and energy limitations of traditional sensor networks. “It relies on the resources of the vehicle itself, along with those vehicles around it.”