26^th December, 2004 Tsunami, a natural disaster, without any prior notice it hits Indonesia, Srilanka and Thailand and took not only hundreds of thousands of lives but also infected hundreds of thousands more and destructed the surrounding in massive scale.

It was realized that to help the wounded and distressed people a communication infrastructure is a must at the disaster area. But all the telecommunication set up was damaged and without any fixed network infrastructure it is really hard to deploy a communication network without any prior notice and within this short period of time. Early 2005, intERLab (AIT), INRIA (France) and Wide project (Japan) exchange their ideas to develop an emergency network named DUMBONet which is based on Mobile Ad hoc Network.

The aim of DUMBO is to provide a multimedia communication network without any pre-exist network infrastructure within least possible time. We used satellite link for communicating with several disaster sites at the same time. The deployment was demonstrated on the 1^st December, 2006 which simulated two disaster areas in Phuket camp (Phuket) and Kinnery camp (Phuket) and headquarter in InterLab (AIT), Bangkok.

For more detail on DUMBO click here.

DUMBO-2 is the second phase of the project DUMBO which deploys an emergency wireless network for post-disaster rescue operation where the fixed network infrastructure is unavailable. Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is self-configuring, infrastructureless, autonomous, standalone wireless network architecture. For the simple and flexible deployment characteristics, it is one of the main potential applications for emergency situations like natural disaster. By using optimization theory we designed and implemented two fully functional prototypes (Mesh-OLSR and MANEMO) for post disaster rescue operation. DUMBO-2 deploys streaming video, voice and text communication with the rescue operators and headquarter. There is an application with GPS integrated with the Google map in the headquarter to track the position and movement of the rescue worker at the disaster area. When a victim is found at the disaster area, the rescue operator informs it to the head quarter and show the condition of the victim. Observing the condition and position of the victim, headquarter asked the rescue worker to move to a specified location where the ambulance will pick up the victim to the hospital within the shortest possible time.

Demo_Video