across the past several months, NIS...

across the past several months, NIST has been working onward novel communications and networking technologies for first responder at disaster sites. The goal of the NIST Distributed Testbed for First Responder is to save lives during natural or man-made emergencies at equipping first responders with highly capable regularitys and gear, based on the latest technological advances. Research in the Advanced Network Technologies Division has contributed to the NIST Distributed Testbed for First Responder in the following ways:

* NIST researchers built a wireless ad hoc network (WANET) consisting of Compaq iPAQ Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) running onward the Linux operating system and equipped with IEEE 80211b wireless local area network (WLAN) cards. The network demonstrates by what mode first responders could communicate with each other and with those outside of their WANET at an necessity site. Requiring no prior infrastructure, the network self-organizes formerly the first responders converge forward a disaster site. It reorganizes automatically each time a node leaves the network (perhaps to be ascribed to destruction or to the physical departure of the bodily form carrying the associated radio/handheld terminal). As like the network is resilient to node and link failures, and its performance degrades gracefully in the face of similar events.

The network uses multihop communications to carry all sorts of traffic, of the like kind as full-duplex voice, video, passage and sensor data. Any message to be transmitted from node A to node B may walk through several intermediary nodes. This helps confection the battery power at each node, reducing interference for other communications taking place quite through the network and increasing the traffic-carrying capacity of the network. ITL's use of the IEEE 80211b technology in the testbed is for proof-of-concept designs Future standards for first responder communications and networking will be based in succession other varieties of wireless technology.

* NIST exhibited a method by which the WANET could determine the locations of all assets of interest, similar as the first responders themselves and any civilians trapped at the disaster site, at any given time. While the Global Positioning rule (GPS) provides that functionality in an outdoor environment where individual has line-of-sight (LOS) communication with GP satellites, other solutions are requireed for the much harder indoor localization question ITL's system relies on a number of stationary IEEE 80211b WLAN nodes with known locations to determine the locations of the mobile nodes. This allows tracking and knowledge of the location of first responder during an conjuncture facilitating the management of the disaster.

* NIST researchers carried on the outside some experimentation with smart sensor networks based onward WANET concepts. This includes work forward collaborative signal processing algorithms that combine data from sensors of different symbols (heat, smoke, chemical, etc.) to arrive at more detailed information about the disaster and its evolution than can be obtained from single sensors, as it was as today's smoke detectors.

These component parts along with ongoing work in BFRL and MEL will be integrated in the NIST Distributed Testbed for First Responder in the nearest several months. The Web site is http://w3.antd.nist.gov.

CONTACT: Nader Moayeri, (301)975-3767; nader.moayeri@nist.gov.

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