Biblio

This study builds a foundation for improving research for first responder communication and situational awareness technology in the future. In an online survey, we elicited the opinions of 250 U.S. first responders about effectiveness, security, and reliability of past, current, and future Internet of Things technology. The most desired features respondents identified were connectivity, reliability, interoperability, and affordability. The top barriers to technology adoption and use included restricted budgets/costs, interoperability, insufficient training resources, and insufficient interagency collaboration and communication. First responders in all job types indicated that technology has made first responder equipment more useful, and technology that supports situational awareness is particularly valued. As such, future Internet of Things capabilities, such as tapping into smart device data in residences and piggybacking onto alternative communication channels, could be valuable for future first responders. Potential areas for future investigation are suggested for technology development and research.

Applications such as fleet management and logistics, emergency response, public security and surveillance or mobile workforce management use geo-positioning and mobile networks as means of enabling real-time monitoring, communication and collaboration among a possibly large set of mobile nodes. The majority of those systems require real-time tracking of mobile nodes (e.g. vehicles, people or mobile robots), reliable communication to/from the nodes, as well as group communication among the mobile nodes. In this paper we describe a distributed middleware with focus on management of context-defined groups of mobile nodes, and group communication with large sets of nodes. We also present a prototype Fleet Tracking and Management system based on our middleware, give an example of how context-specific group communication can enhance the node's mutual awareness, and show initial performance results that indicate small overhead and latency of the group communication and management.