Peer-to-peer concepts for emergency first response

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology has already been established in several application domains, e.g., IP telephony, file sharing, and content distribution. It is considered to be distributed, ad-hoc, robust and scalable approach for digital information transfer. In this thesis, the P2P communication paradigm is proposed as an alternative communication approach in the first response application domain. Disaster relief efforts, after larger scale catastrophes, suffer from damaged or destroyed communication infrastructure. Satellite connection equipment is hardly available and costly, and therefore rescue workers tend to send foot messengers to relay messages between the on-site organizations. A P2P-inspired communication approach for first responders would relieve the overloading of communication channels, can function as a completely self-contained method and remove the need for centrally managed communication approaches, which might be damaged or destroyed after catastrophes. In this thesis, we investigate a breakdown of the P2P-inspired communication approach in four distinct layers. We identify the key challenges for each layer and propose novel approaches for the most important challenges in each layer. The main contributions are: (i) a systematic breakdown of the communication concept in four distinct layers, and (ii) a mechanism called ’BridgeFinder’, which increases the robustness of the communication network. The overlay network (iii) ’Pathfinder’ provides key functionalities like routing, lookup and exhaustive search. The application-level multicast (iv) provides an efficient way of sending messages to multiple recipients. The novel mechanism (v), called DCC, provides reliable command and control structure management in a distributed fashion. Besides the technical concept, we developed a simulation environment with working prototypes for each contribution. Further, we evaluated the robustness, scalability and efficiency of these communication approaches. We show that they meet the stipulated requirements of first responders and perform at least equally or better than the current approaches.