A Wireless Mesh Monitoring and Planning Tool for Emergency Services

During a crisis situation, it is essential for emergency services to have a reliable communication network. Because one cannot trust on existing infrastructure, wireless mesh technology can be a good networking mechanism to provide high broadband communication while performing rescue operations. In this paper, we´ll describe the concept and implementation of a monitoring and planning tool that can assist an intervention team in deploying the network and providing a real-time overview of the status of the network. To minimize overhead on the network, we use the packet pair probing technique for the estimation of the link capacity. The information is disseminated throughout the network to estimate end-to-end throughput. Our distributed monitoring technique is based on a layer 3 approach, which is transparent to underlying layers. To assist the intervention team in determining the best location for adding new nodes, our planning tool will continuously monitor signal strength in the environment. The applicability of the system is proven by experiment in a real testing environment.