Delay Tolerant Streaming in Rescue Scenarios: Requirements Analysis and Resulting Industrial Issues - Version 2

Abstract

In emergency intervention and rescue operations, the coordination and collaboration of the rescue personnel is highly important for the success of the mission. Data networks formed between the devices carried by the rescue personnel can provide the means for collaboration and coordination on the operation scene. Unfortunately, the unforeseeable conditions and characteristics (e.g., size of the scene, availabilities of access ways for the rescue personnel, availability and status of the infrastructure) of the rescue operations can hinder (e.g., intermittently unavailable network infrastructure) and disrupt (e.g., network partitions) communication of data networks. Even in these adverse conditions coordination and collaboration need to be enabled between the participants of the rescue operation. In this technical report we analyse the usage of streaming services (data, audio and video) to improve coordination and collaboration tasks in rescue and emergency operations. We present a detailed requirement analysis for middleware services that support streaming of data, imposed by this application domain from a research and an industrial perspective. For this purpose, we present two rescue scenarios, which helped us perform the requirements analysis for supporting streaming in intermittently connected networks. Additionally, we also present an example from a middleware for streaming voice traffic within large organizations with multiple working sites. Although these examples might seem different, they have similar requirements considering the availability and awareness of network resources.