Emergency Response Communications and Associated Security Challenges

The natural or man-made disaster demands an efficient communication and coordination among first responders to save life and other community resources. Normally, the traditional communication infrastructures such as landline or cellular networks are damaged and don’t provide adequate communication services to first responders for exchanging emergency related information. Wireless ad hoc networks such as mobile ad hoc networks, wireless sensor networks and wireless mesh networks are the promising alternatives in such type of situations. The security requirements for emergency response communications include privacy, data integrity, authentication, key management, access control and availability. Various ad hoc communication frameworks have been proposed for emergency response situations. The majority of the proposed frameworks don’t provide adequate security services for reliable and secure information exchange. This paper presents a survey of the proposed emergency response communication frameworks and the potential security services required by them to provide reliable and secure information exchange during emergency situations.