HIRO-NET: Heterogeneous Intelligent Robotic Network for Internet Sharing in Disaster Scenarios

This paper has implemented a thorough network framework in disaster scenarios by utilizing smart devices of ground users and deploying HIRO-NET app, heterogeneous network protocols and different types of robots. The network has two tiers, the lower tier and the upper tier, and three types of nodes, users, robots and Base of Operations (BO). The lower-tier network is used for local coordination among survivors, provides following functionalities:

• mesh group forming among user nodes (smart-phone / tablet, iOS / Android) via BLE, max number of users per group is 116, Client-Server paradigm.
• capture wide-area network signals leveraging existing WiFi and Cellular components in order to share Internet connectivity (if exists) with other participants in the entire emergency network (EN).

The upper-tier network is also a mesh network consisting of the robotic vehicles, however by the design of this paper, they are controlled by first responders, not autonomous. So my reading ends here. It is interesting to learn about how other solutions work under the same assumption.