Years of Wireless Ad Hoc Networking Research : What about Humanitarian and Disaster Relief Solutions ? What are we still missing ?

In the event of a disaster, the communication infrastructure can be partially or totally destroyed, or rendered unavailable due to high congestion. However, during such crisis situations, there is an acute need for information exchange for both rescue organizations and victims. Temporary communication solutions are thus of utmost importance until the infrastructure is restored. In this paper, we start by reviewing communication solutions – stemming from 30 years of research on ad hoc, mesh and delaytolerant networks – able to uphold communications during disasters when the communication infrastructure is destroyed, overloaded or not existing in the first place. We present how these solutions can be applied and summarize the advantages and disadvantages of each unique approach. In a second part, we present, Twimight, a Twitter application relying on delay-tolerant opportunistic communications to spread tweets and sensor data in an epidemic fashion. Twimight is an open source Twitter client for Android phones featured with a “disaster mode”, which users enable upon losing connectivity. In the disaster mode, tweets are not sent to the Twitter server but stored on the phone, carried around as people move, and forwarded opportunistically when in proximity with other phones. Eventually, we demonstrate how opportunistic technologies such as Twimight can be of great value right after a disaster by enabling the self-organization of victims and a better coordination with first rescue organizations. We discuss the main challenges to overcome and provide directions for future research both non-technical (e.g. user adoption of technology) and technical (e.g. security and data privacy).