The Case for Smartphones as an Urgent Computing Client Platform

Abstract

The computing world is now populated with smartphones which combine the features of a phone with a general purpose computer and come loaded with sensors including digital cameras, global positioning system (GPS) receivers, accelerometers and many more. In this paper we argue that these devices are an ideal platform for collecting data for use in urgent computing simulations. We describe how these devices will have far reaching impacts on how people connect with and organize their communities and discuss how this coincides with the rise of community driven response to disasters and the need for decentralized command and control that is discussed in disaster management literature. We also that smartphones, by providing technology which can network people without the use of centralized infrastructure, and which are carried, used, and maintained as part of daily life, are a promising platform for building distributed disaster management applications, which could be part of the inputs provided to an urgent computing simulation. In this paper we describe not only the potential of the platform, but also analyze the challenges it faces in order to realize that potential, and discuss how our middleware is designed to meet these challenges and bring about the future of disaster management applications for smartphones using urgent computing.