Abstract
Disaster management is one of the most relevant application fields of wireless sensor networks. In this application, the role of the sensor network usually consists of obtaining a representation or a model of a physical phenomenon spreading through the affected area. In this work we focus on forest firefighting operations, proposing three fully distributed ways for approximating the actual shape of the fire. In the simplest approach, a circular burnt area is assumed around each node that has detected the fire and the union of these circles gives the overall fire’s shape. However, as this approach makes an intensive use of the wireless sensor network resources, we have proposed to incorporate two in-network aggregation techniques, which do not require considering the complete set of fire detections. The first technique models the fire by means of a complex shape composed of multiple convex hulls representing different burning areas, while the second technique uses a set of arbitrary polygons. Performance evaluation of realistic fire models on computer simulations reveals that the method based on arbitrary polygons obtains an improvement of 20% in terms of accuracy of the fire shape approximation, reducing the overhead in-network resources to 10% in the best case.
Highlights
Forest fires are a common occurrence in several countries all around the world because of the general increase of hot and dry climate conditions and the presence of large forests
In [19], we proved that this approach greatly helps in saving network resources, since meaningless events coming from nodes that do not contribute in improving the current fire shape are discarded
We focus on forest firefighting operations and in particular on the EIDOS system [15, 16], which was proposed as a disaster management system to help firefighters to increase their efficacy, while minimizing their risks
Summary
Forest fires are a common occurrence in several countries all around the world because of the general increase of hot and dry climate conditions and the presence of large forests. In most European countries such as Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey, as well as parts of Africa, Australia, and USA, every summer numerous fires destroy thousands of acres of forests and pose great risks to life and infrastructure during all times of the year. According to the Joint Research Centre (JRC), in just one year a total of 323,896 hectares of land has been destroyed in 52,795 fires in France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain [2]. Forest fires have a lasting impact on social, environmental, and financial aspects. Strategies of fire prevention, detection, and suppression have varied over the years, and international experts encourage further development of technology and research [10]
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