Mountain climbing or trekking becomes popular in Japan recently. Unfortunately the more climbers go to mountains, the more get lost. Handy GPS’s are a well-known tool to navigate climbers in the mountain area by displaying their location on a digital map. They are useful to know the current location, but not suitable to call an emergency help. Cell phones are useful to call a help, but they work only in the city area accessible to mobile phone networks. They seldom get access to them in the mountain area. This paper proposes a new trekking navigation system, which consists of mobile terminals and a server, that works even in the poor communication environment where the Internet access is often disrupted such as in the mountain area. The terminals can navigate climbers even when the Internet access is unavailable. When they can get access to the server, they send the walking trajectory of the climbers, so the rescue party can locate the climbers in need. They can also exchange the walking trajectory with each other by utilizing opportunistic communication and carry the information until they reach an area accessible to the server. This paper shows a prototype of trekking navigation system under development and how the opportunistic communication improves the location estimation of climbers.
[1]
Athanasios V. Vasilakos,et al.
Delay Tolerant Networks: Protocols and Applications
,
2011
.
[2]
Michael Wooldridge,et al.
Introduction to multiagent systems
,
2001
.
[3]
Barbara Messing,et al.
An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems
,
2002,
Künstliche Intell..
[4]
Edmund H. Durfee,et al.
Coherent Cooperation Among Communicating Problem Solvers
,
1987,
IEEE Transactions on Computers.
[5]
Akihiro Fujihara,et al.
Scaling Relations of Data Gathering Times in an Epidemically Data Sharing System with Opportunistically Communicating Mobile Sensors
,
2011,
Intelligent Networking, Collaborative Systems and Applications.