SOURCEFORGE » RALF » 2015 Satellite emergency small terminal

h1. Context  Introduction

Emergency response is a challenging situation that contains a lot of problems arising in a matter of hours after the disaster. 

Few of those challenges are:

* Situation assessment, evaluate current disaster scope and identify the most urging matters.

* search and rescue (plus medical care following this rescue)

* Emergency sheltering

* Food and water supplies

* Operation coordination

All of those problems must be solved using changing and partial information, rapidly changing priorities and stressed peoples.

In a nutshell, every emergency situation is unique, random and complex. The solution to this is standardisation of operation management.

Coordinating those operations needs reliable communication means. Hopelessly, usual communication means are very often everything but reliable in the hours following the disaster.

For instance, local phone network cells may be offline or saturated.

The response to the possible unavailability of all those communication means is flexibility. It is desirable to be able to set up an outpost in most situations,

if not internet connexion is available, the outpost should be able to function in degraded mode. If internet is available, we should make use of it regardless of its nature (either

a satellite access, a wifi hotspot or a wired connection.)

Those outpost should be as much as possible connected to an information backbone, in order to provide the best situation awareness to the personnel.