Wireless Balloon Network for Disaster Information System

In this paper, in order to quickly recover communication network where the communication facility was seriously damaged and to collect the information with evacuated residents and disaster areas, we propose a balloon wireless network which is realized by combining balloons and wireless LANs and organizing into an adhoc network in the air. Using this balloon network, the damaged communication line can be quickly recovered. By combining with balloon wireless network and wired Internet overlay network, more robust, flexible and large scale disaster information network system can be realized even though some of the network lines and nodes are damaged and destroyed. In order to verify the usefulness of the suggested balloon network, a prototype system was constructed and made performance evaluation.