HELPER NETWORK – A helping hand in emergency

Portable & Cost Effective

The choice of components was made with careful consideration to ensure the smallest form-factor and portability. The major factor contributing to size and weight of...

Emergency Services

Live Map Updates A local Map with live updates on availability of resources like gas stations, operational hospitals, food and water, internet, and electricity will be...

Energy Efficient Routing Protocol

A distributed energy efficient routing algorithm (SEEK) is developed to maximize network lifetime while maintaining reliable connectivity. In energy constrained network like HELPER network, the...

Scalable Design

The proposed architecture is carefully designed to be readily extendable. New HELPERs can be added or removed from the network with ease as the network...

User-Friendly Application

A user-friendly website application has been developed that equips every user who has lost all other means of communication to connect seamlessly to the HELPER Network....

Heterogeneous Efficient Low PowEr Radio (HELPER) hardware is selected to develop portable, low SWaP (size, weight power) yet powerful platform that is flexible enough for community members to adapt and enhance these solutions. We envision three types of HELPERs as shown below, Mobile HELPER Static HELPER Aerial HELPER Though these HELPERs mainly vary in size, portability, energy consumption, and…

Framework

In this work, we have developed a framework consisting of communication protocol stack, novel protocols and packet structure, packet handling while determining the necessary interactions between different layers to enable a cross-layered approach to optimize the network performance. The detailed design concepts can be found below, HELPER CROSS-LAYER PROTOCOL STACK Figure 1: Implementation of Cross-layer…

HELPER Messages

The HELPER network consists of two kinds of HELPERs; (i) HELPERs that are in households, hospitals, and other building that residents (survivors of disaster) connect to and usually have limited power supply and (ii) HELPER that forms Emergency Response Center (ERC) and usually has an unlimited power supply. Accordingly, messages can be classified as end-user messages and ERC…

Application

HELPER WEB APPLICATION FOR END-USER Login Page Every user connected to a HELPER will be prompted to access the capabilities of HELPER network by logging in to the Web application shown in Figure 1. As you can see, the login page consists of the location of the HELPER (marked using a Black marker) that the user is…

Feedback-Based Design

A great deal of importance is given to end-user experience while designing HELPER Network. Here, we describe some of our feedback-based design choices. End-User Connectivity Technology There is a plethora of medium range, high data rate technologies like ZigBee etc. The decision to use WiFi was to ensure maximum community engagement and easy connectivity. The WiFi link…

Demonstration Videos

We have prototyped 6 HELPERs for our demonstration purposes. Five of them in 3-D printed Boxes were deployed for end users to connect while the remaining one served as the Emergency Response Center (ERC). It has the same Hardware as you can see sitting outside on the table along with batteries. HELPER Network…

Hardware

Framework

HELPER Messages

Application

Feedback-Based Design

Demonstration Videos

Andrew Drozd

Jithin Jagannath

Sean Furman

Anu Jagannath

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