Panther: A middleware-based post-disaster communication system.

摘要

The natural disasters happened these years in different countries around the world have exposed the problems in the post-disaster communication to the public. The absence of the infrastructure has made it extremely difficult for the survivals, rescuers to communicate and find each other.;This thesis introduced the Panther: a middleware-based communication system with its formatted message and routing mechanism. It is aimed at solving the problem caused by the absence of infrastructure in the post-disaster communication. Panther core communication system is the lower-level core system for the whole communication system. It is the system which could enable the heterogeneous devices to communicate with each other in order to help the largest amount of persons to communicate and share information with each other which we believe is extremely important in saving lives after the disaster happens.;Besides providing the largest number of persons to communicate with each other, how to communicate promptly and share information efficiently and reliably would also be important after the disaster. So on the top of the Panther core system, we also proposed the routing mechanism and Panther formatted message.;We also evaluated the effect of the gateway introduced in our Panther core system by simulating the scenario with and without it. We simulated the scenarios in which some of the devices may not be available due to the privacy or energy concern as well. Finally, we also evaluated the number of hops/peers a request would pass by in a separated evaluation scenario.;All the related work in post-disaster communication so far mostly relies on the higher level architecture such as satellites, GPS systems while we are dealing with lower level: the mobile devices themselves. Also, as far as we know they are focused on the concept and architecture for the post-disaster communication system without the real implementations. Besides the post-communication system, our panther system can also be regarded related to P2P system and mobile communication system in the way how they are organized and behaved. DTN (Delay/Disruption Tolerant Network) has the feature similar to what an ideal post-communication system needs to have. The information storage and query format research is also beneficial to our work.