Automatic and robust breadcrumb system deployment for indoor firefighter applications

Breadcrumb systems (BCS) have been proposed to aid firefighters inside buildings by communicating their physiological parameters to base stations outside the buildings. In this paper, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of an automatic and robust breadcrumb system for firefighter applications. Our solution includes a breadcrumb dispenser with an optimized link estimator that is used to decide when to deploy breadcrumbs to maintain reliable wireless connectivity. The solution includes accounting for realities of buildings and dispensing such as the height difference between where the dispenser is worn and the floor where the dispensed nodes are found. We also include adaptive power management to maintain link quality over time. Experimental results from our study show that compared to the state of the art solution [14], our breadcrumb system achieves 200% link redundancy with only 23% additional deployed nodes. Our deployed crumb-chain can achieve 90% probability of end-to-end connectivity when one node fails in the crumb-chain and over 50% probability of end-to-end connectivity when up to 3 nodes fail in the crumb-chain. In addition, by applying adaptive transmission power control at each node after the crumb-chain deployment, we solve the link quality variation problem by avoiding significant variations in packet reception ratio (PRR) and maintain PRR of over 90% at the link level.