Network Awareness and the Philadelphia Area Urban Wireless Network Testbed

This paper overviews the Philadelphia Area Urban Wireless Network Testbed (PA-UWNT) project and several applications of artificial intelligence therein. PA-UWNT is a research and development effort in mobile and ubiquitous computing, focusing on communication and collaboration between first responders and other emergency personnel. Support systems in these environments face a number of challenges such as a lack of in-place infrastructure, frequent network disruptions, and limited bandwidth and power. The Testbed, consisting of robust networked computing platforms along with access to public and private locations, enables the project to test, evaluate, and develop new approaches to effectively supporting users in these domains. In this work, agents that reason on network state and available services in conducting information dissemination and collection tasks are proposed and evaluated.