Feasibility study of a mobile ad-hoc SOS system

This paper reports on a feasibility study of a smartphone-based SOS system. Compared to other emergency systems the presented system: a) is independent from existing network infrastructure and b) runs on off-the-shelf devices. The presented system exploits Wi-Fi service set identifiers (SSIDs) for the discovery of phones and to convey short emergency messages. It can operate in two setups: either the victims’ phones send out a distress signal or the responder’s device is beaconing a rescue signal. By means of attaching the responder device to an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) the scalability of both setups were compared with each other. Both setups were explored at two different altitudes. This paper concludes with aspects for future work.