A lethal and highly-contagious virus gradually begins to spread around the globe. Infection rates are high, deaths are frequent, and no vaccine is available. Cities all over the world fall under quarantine. Emergency services and medical centers are stressed and national government agencies, affected just as severely as the cities themselves, cannot provide assistance. And then the situation goes from bad to worse…
Strong Angel III is a training exercise to be held in several locations near downtown San Diego. The emergency response team is drawn from US government agencies, the military, First Responders, domestic and international humanitarian organizations, academia, and private volunteers. Two previous demonstrations took place in 2000 and 2004.
Over the course of a week, Strong Angel III will conduct tasks to explore solutions proposed for lessons learned in Iraq, the South Asian tsunami, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The demonstration will consist of a series of tasks seen in the real-world. The goal will be the establishing of a model of community resilience in the face of adversity.
Some of these tasks will showcase technologies from both the public and private sectors. Others will focus on the non-technical aspects of mutual aid, self-sustainment, and collaborative cooperation.
During Strong Angel II in 2004, a series of experiments around a concept called The Pony Express, was used. It involved the use of Groove-based mobile infrastructure to deliver data synchronization services to users beyond the horizon of connectivity. An SUV was outfitted with a laptop-based Groove Relay Server and an 802.11 WiFi router.
The Groove Relay Server uploaded any changes and downloaded any changes stored on the Relay. The Pony Express would then drive on to the next site and the next, until it returned to base camp, where a satellite Internet connection was available. The Pony Express would synchronize all changes made by disconnected users
For Strong Angel III, RSS Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) will be used. It runs on a laptop running IIS and SQL Server. SSE, as an extension of RSS, is platform, device, and application agnostic, and it has been released under a Creative Commons license. The idea behind Simple Sharing Extensions is to allow multi-directional synchronization of data across multiple applications.
Two of these units will be co-located in a vehicle with a mesh WiFi router. Each of the Relays will be cross-subscribed with each other. When a Mobile Relay comes within WiFi range, their devices will replicate with the Relay. The pair of Relays, having replicated with users distributed throughout their respective quarantine zones, will approach one another on either side of the quarantine boundary that they are not permitted to traverse.
When in WiFi range of one another, the two WiFi clouds emitted from the vehicles will mesh across quarantine zones, and their cross-subscribed SSE Mobile Relays will replicate with one another. The two Relays may then return to their respective rounds, delivering to their users the Requests and Assessments collected in the opposite quarantine zone.
The primary goal is to demonstrate the ability to maintain shared situational awareness across quarantine zones, intermittent networks, organizational boundaries, and a mixture of devices, platforms, and applications.
SDSU’s Visualization Center, the secondary site of operations, will be the central point for information processing, mapping and incoming visual footage and data from remote cameras at the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department Training Facility site and from satellite sites throughout San Diego County.
After an initial setup phase, teams from various organizations will conduct more than 40 pre-defined experiments. The experiments will test and demonstrate the usefulness of various technologies and proven techniques, providing valuable information on which solutions and combinations thereof will be of most benefit to first responders, health officials, defense personnel and others in the event of a major disaster.
As the demonstration progresses, Strong Angel III participants will face additional unannounced challenges and constraints, including technical, social, operational, and environmental problems, that are characteristic of humanitarian operations during major natural disasters. Major sponsors and event participants include Microsoft, Bell Canada, Save the Children, Cisco Systems, Sprint Nextel, Google, the Naval Postgraduate School, the U.S. Department of Defense and CommsFirst.
Perhaps an enterprising student could make $1B by putting a 160 GByte wireless router or tiny PC inside a UAV. Shakespeare for everyone!
In other news, GPU is a Gnutella client that creates ad-hoc supercomputers by allowing individual PCs on the network to share CPU resources with each other. That’s intriguing enough, but the really interesting thing about GPU is the license its developers have given it.
They call it a “no military use” modified version of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Tiziano Mengotti and Rene Tegel are the lead developers on the GPU project. Mengotti is the driving force behind the license “patch,” which says “the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed.”
DailyWireless has more on the Digital Pony Express (above) used in Cambodia 3 years ago.
