Towards autonomic emergency communications: Evolution of cooperative networking

The most recent evolution of and the advancement in the area of autonomic cooperative networking appears to be very appealing when it comes to emergency system design. Emergency networks are formed, among others, by the First Responders present and operating in the area of incident. Thus it is necessary to guarantee an accurate and immediate deployment of the Chief First Responders coordinating the actions undertaken by the First Responders belonging to their groups. Consequently, the entire networked system is expected to be able to adapt accurately to the changing external conditions. More specifically, it is possible to instantiate cooperative transmission between different Chief First Responders so that they may mutually support each other or one another when their respective First Responders are served. This paper then provides an analysis of several different cooperative set-ups of such a type allowing to quantify the potential gains which would result from autonomic switching between or among them.