Can We Use Your Router, Please?: Benefits and Implications of an Emergency Switch for Wireless Routers

Emergency Mode For Wireless Routers

The amount of households equipped with Internet connection heavily depends on the country. In economic countries like Sweden, Singapore, and Denmark more than 90% of the citizens have access to the Internet from their homes according to a study in 2011 (Morales, 2013). In the United States 80% and in Germany 77% of citizens have Internet access from their homes. Many of those households use wireless routers to connect multiple devices to the Internet. Especially in apartment buildings this may lead to a multitude of available wireless routers. The authors perceive this fact, when searching for available wireless devices at home. The routers found during the scanning process belong to neighbors in the same building or in houses on the opposite side of the road.

This infrastructure is very dense and should be available to first responders during rescue missions in urban environments. This is why we propose an emergency switch for wireless routers. The idea is to create a wireless mesh network (Raniwala & Chiueh, 2005) by interconnecting all privately owned wireless routers. This infrastructure then acts as a communication backbone in case of a disaster. It can fill the communication gap between the incident site and the command and control center by forwarding the network packages from one router to the next until the destination is reached.