Emergency Services in Delay Tolerant Environments

There are number of mechanisms and algorithms available to achieve ad hoc communication. However, establishing communication between heterogeneous networks with fragile connectivity, is still a challenging task. Existing transport protocols like TCP are not well suited to networks with instable bandwidth and connectivity. In such environments, services cannot be reliably offered and hence more intelligent protocols and architectures should be used. For such scenarios, we study the feasibility of using opportunistic forwarding to achieve end-to-end communication. In this paper, we investigate the usage of delay tolerant networks based protocols for achieving reliable communication in such scenarios. Specifically, we study the provision of emergency services and show how mobile users could make use of the ad hoc peers to reach an appropriate answering point e.g., public safety answering point using the delay tolerant approach. Moreover, we have extended the usage of DTN for complementary services such as buddy communication.