Virtual Sensor Network Lifeline for Communications in Fire Fighting Rescue Scenarios

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been used mainly to collect environmental data and send it to a base station. Routing protocols are needed to efficiently direct the information to the base station. Most of the available routing protocols are designed for conventional WSN applications, where small volume data transmission is required and low power consumption is the fundamental. Support to mobility is generally out of interest, since in most scenarios sensor nodes are static after being deployed. However, in fire fighting rescue scenarios, WSN routing protocols are expected to be able to adapt to change of network topology (caused by nodes failure and fire fighters´ movement) rapidly. Moreover, routing protocols should be capable to transmit relatively large volume data (e.g. short voice message) without losing efficiency and reliability. In this paper we propose a broadcasting based communication protocol, which is dedicated to the fire fighting rescue scenarios under the framework of a European project wearIT@work. This protocol is applied to building up a virtual lifeline for fire fighters. The protocol is evaluated through experimental tests and simulations using variant scenarios. Performance metrics such as packet transmission time, jitter and packet loss rate are considered. Results show that our broadcasting based communication protocol is able to fulfill the requirements and is more suitable to fire fighting rescue scenarios.