  In post-disaster scenarios, such as after floods, earthquakes, and in war
zones, the cellular communication infrastructure may be destroyed or seriously
disrupted. In such emergency scenarios, it becomes very important for first aid
responders to communicate with other rescue teams in order to provide feedback
to both the central office and the disaster survivors. To address this issue,
rapidly deployable systems are required to re-establish connectivity and assist
users and first responders in the region of incident. In this work, we describe
the design, implementation, and evaluation of a rapidly deployable system for
first response applications in post-disaster situations, named RDSP. The
proposed system helps early rescue responders and victims by sharing their
location information to remotely located servers by utilizing a novel routing
scheme. This novel routing scheme consists of the Dynamic ID Assignment (DIA)
algorithm and the Minimum Maximum Neighbor (MMN) algorithm. The DIA algorithm
is used by relay devices to dynamically select their IDs on the basis of all
the available IDs of networks. Whereas, the MMN algorithm is used by the client
and relay devices to dynamically select their next neighbor relays for the
transmission of messages. The RDSP contains three devices; the client device
sends the victim's location information to the server, the relay device relays
information between client and server device, the server device receives
messages from the client device to alert the rescue team. We deployed and
evaluated our system in the outdoor environment of the university campus. The
experimental results show that the RDSP system reduces the message delivery
delay and improves the message delivery ratio with lower communication
overhead.
