RescueMe: Smartphone-Based Self Rescue System for Disaster Rescue

Abstract

Recent ubiquitous earthquakes have been leading to mass destruction of electrical power and cellular infrastructures, and deprive the innocent lives across the world. Due to the wide-area earthquake disaster, unavailable power and communication infrastructure, limited man-power and resource, traditional rescue operations and equipment are inefficient and time-consuming, leading to the golden hours missed. With the increasing proliferation of powerful wireless devices, like smartphones, they can be assumed to be abundantly available among the disaster victims and can act as valuable resource to coordinate disaster rescue operations. In this paper, we propose a smartphone-based self rescue system, also referred to as RescueMe, to assist the operations of disaster rescue and relief. The basic idea of RescueMe is that a set of smartphones carried by survivors trapped or buried under the collapsed infrastructure forms into a one-hop network and sends out distress signal in an energy-efficient manner to nearby rescue crews to assist rescue operations. We evaluate the proposed approach through extensive simulation experiment and compare its performance with the existing scheme TeamPhone. The simulation results show that the proposed approach can significantly reduce the schedule vacancy of broadcasting distress signal and improve the discovery probability with very little sacrifice of network lifetime, and indicate a potentially viable approach to expedite disaster rescue and relief operations.