A Smartphone-Assisted Post-Disaster Victim Localization Method

Abstract

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, can cause severe destruction and create havoc in the society. Buildings and other structures may collapse during disaster incidents causing injuries and deaths to victims trapped under debris and rubble. Immediately after a natural disaster incident, it becomes extremely difficult for first responders and rescuers to find and save trapped victims. Often searches are carried out blindly in random locations, which delay the rescue of the victims. This paper presents a Smartphone-Assisted Victim Localization (SmartVL) method in which smartphones belonging to trapped victims and other people in disaster affected areas can self-detect the occurrence of a disaster incident by monitoring the radio environment and can self-switch to a disaster mode to transmit emergency help messages with their location coordinates to other smartphones nearby. To locate other neighbouring smartphones also operating in the disaster mode, each smartphone runs a rendezvous process. The SmartVL method can guide search and rescue operations and increase the possibility of saving lives. Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) network has been considered for this work. Simulation results have shown a significant rendezvous performance enhancement can be achieved when channel hopping sequence is constructed based on channel ranking.