Apps and systems

Apps

• Disaster Messenger

DisasterMessenger allows sharing of situational information (text, image, video or voice recordings) without the help of conventional network infrastructure. Several Android based applications are available which offers only unicast mode of communication while lacking to provide multicast and broadcast services. DisasterMessenger allows the users to disseminate situational information in absence of network infrastructure in unicast, multicast and broadcast mode.

• Post Disaster Map Builder

Constructing digital pedestrian maps of the disaster affected areas is a vital requirement for post-disaster response operation. Digital maps help disaster management agencies in decision making and mobilising the manpower and resources in the disaster affected areas. However, due to the intermittent connectivity after large scale natural disasters, the existing web based digital mapping systems remain inaccessible in the disaster affected areas. Moreover, the road networks in such areas change drastically because of disaster (for instance water logging due to flood, structural collapse or incidental destruction like a landslide). Hence, existing analog (paper based) route maps of such areas become obsolete. The proposed system generates digital pedestrian maps of the disaster affected areas using battery powered mobile handheld devices. Here, trajectory traces collected by the volunteers are periodically shared among the other volunteers of the disaster affected area through smartphone based DTN. Pedestrian maps of the disaster affected areas are gradually constructed in the mobile handheld devices of the volunteers by combining the collected traces over time.

Systems

• Modified ONE Simulator

The Opportunistic Network Environment (ONE) simulator is a Java based simulator intended for research in Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs). Apart from allowing users to simulate different DTN scenarios rapidly and in a versatile manner, it also offers an easy way to generate results from the simulations performed. Although the ONE simulator is widely accepted among the DTN research community as a standard DTN simulator, it supports only some limited features of DTN. The current release of the ONE simulator (version 1.6.0) only supports dissemination of messages with textual content over unicast mode of communication. The propagation of messages containing multimedia content and support for multicasting and broadcasting mode of communication are still not included in it. We propose to implement the multicast and broadcast modes of communication and dissemination of multimedia content in the ONE simulator. We augment the ONE simulator version 1.5.1 RC-2 to incorporate the proposed features.

The apps and systems can be accessed from Github: https://github.com/suman-iiest?tab=repositories