Understanding Opportunistic Networking for Emergency Services: Analysis of One Year of GPS Traces

Opportunistic networking can help emergency services in both their daily operation and disaster relief. This idea has been extensively explored in previous research, but most studies are based on little knowledge of real mobility. In order to support future research, this paper analyses one year of GPS traces from a fire department. The results reveal the characteristics of hypothetic opportunistic networks formed by devices following this mobility considering different communication ranges. We found that the networks analysed are heterogeneous in many dimensions. They are also sparse and partitioned, but delay-tolerant routes connecting these partitions exist. To ease the discovery of these routes, we reveal in the connections between nodes. These findings can be applied in the design and deployment of solutions from the physical to the application layer.