Context aware data synchronisation during emergencies

Abstract

Today emergency management teams highly use internet-connected devices to improve the accuracy and immediacy of data collection and sharing. However, most cloud-based data synchronisation models rely on centralised components to share their data between users and do not support situations where the internet connection is unreliable or unavailable. This becomes particularly important when working in disaster-affected areas, where the internet infrastructure itself may be damaged but multiple, offline users are within close range of each other. Peer-to-peer data synchronisation can provide a great opportunity for performing data synchronisation locally between the mobile peers in an offline mode. However, it introduces new challenges in terms of conflict resolution, security and data consistency and integrity. In this paper, we propose a context-aware peer to peer data synchronisation framework for mobile environments when the internet becomes unavailable. The proposed approach introduces novel methods for peer discovery, user authentication and authorisation, as well as managing data versioning.