Disaster strikes! Internet blackout! What's the fate of crisis mapping?

Abstract

Facebook's "Mark Yourself Safe"or Google Person Finder are quite popular nowadays. Such applications generate crisis maps based on crowdsourced information during or after disasters. Crisis maps are inevitably an extremely effective digital dashboard application for rescue and reliefs. But what if there is even a partial Internet blackout after the disaster strikes? This is indeed a common scenario, but today's crisis mapping solutions heavily depend on the Internet. In this paper, we discuss a thorough background study and design details of Soteria, an end-to-end solution for smartphone-based opportunistic crisis mapping in the fate of Internet blackouts. Soteria uses intelligent and energy-efficient mechanisms for opportunistic ad-hoc information collection and filtering along with data summarization and dashboard application for crisis mapping over end-users' smartphones. The smartphone application intelligently incorporates and tunes the existing network systems and services at the backend to make the system work even when the conventional network infrastructure fails. We evaluate the performance of Soteria from multiple field-trials for over five years, and the observed quantitative and qualitative performance is extremely promising for its mass-scale adoption at the disaster-prone areas.