Location awareness in a mountain rescue domain

The notion of location awareness in a Mountain Rescue domain is critical for the mission coordinator of a Mountain Rescue Team who tries to organize the team and make informed decisions for all its members. The knowledge of location of each member of the team while they are on a mission, could be provided by sending GPS coordinates from a device that each rescue worker would carry, to the server of the team located at its headquarters. The physical characteristics of the Mountain Rescue domain along with the unpredictable movement of the rescue workers during a mission prevent the deployment of a fixed network infrastructure to facilitate the transmission of the GPS coordinates and therefore alternative communication options should be defined and utilized. As a result, this project had to define a communication framework with all the viable connectivity options that seem to apply to this domain. Furthermore, an application for the device that the rescue worker will carry that would be able to transmit GPS coordinates by utilizing the defined communication framework was also required. Finally, a server application that would be able to listen for the GPS coordinates sent from the clients was required as well. The focus of this project was on the application developed for the client and its capability to identify the availability of each connectivity option and utilize the best suited one, based on their prioritization defined in the communication framework. The theoretical and practical evaluation of the developed prototype system proves that the outcome of this project satisfied the described proof of concept and successfully met all its requirements.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

masters

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

masters

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Lancaster University

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Georgopoulos, Panagiotis