Location Awareness in a Mountain Rescue Domain

Abstract

Aiding the efficient collaboration and coordination of rescue teams is a challenging task especially in a heterogeneous mountainous region. Knowing the exact location of the rescuers during a mountain search and rescue mission can be of great value for the successful progress of the mission and help the mission coordinator in taking informed decisions. The devised Location Awareness System can provide, in a quasi real time manner, exact location information of the rescuers on the mountain, to the mission coordinator who usually stays at the headquarters to organize the operation. The mountain rescue domain poses many difficulties in the terms of network connectivity and thus feasible and effective connectivity options had to be identified and exploited by the developed system. Our collaboration with a real rescue team provided the grounds for analyzing the rescue mission’s mobility patterns and requirements and for evaluating the system in a mountain rescue environment. The results from our tests show that our system can provide precise location information and also be able to recover from any connectivity loss either periodic or total.