Event-Based Interaction for Rescue and Emergency Applications in Mobile and Disruptive Environments

Abstract

Event-based interaction is suitable for rescue and emergency applications because the filtering capabilities can help to prevent information overload, and such interaction may be offered by an Event Notification Service (ENS). We focus on ENS in sparse Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs), since an incident may occur e.g., in a deserted place lacking infrastructure, the density of nodes may be low, and there may be physical obstacles limiting the transmission range. The asynchronous communication provided by the ENS is suited for an environment where there may be long-lasting network partitions. In this chapter, we describe characteristics of rescue operations and use this as a basis for discussing ENS design choices such as subscription language, architecture and routing. Afterwards, we present our own ENS solution, the Distributed Event Notification Service (DENS), which is tailored for such an application domain.