Satellite Communications for Management of Mass Casualty Incidents: The e-Triage Project

Abstract

This paper describes the communications infrastructure used in the e-Triage Project. The main objective of e-Triage is the effcient electronic on-site registration of victims in Mass Casualty Incidents (MCIs) to enable a fast distribution of the information to operation control centers and hospitals for a better handling of victims. To achieve this, e-Triage designs the end-device used to register the victims, the distributed database where the information of the victims is saved, and the communications infrastructure necessary to transmit the data. After a disaster event the terrestrial commercial networks are likely to be overloaded, damaged or not operative, if they ever existed. A dynamic network extension is envisaged for dedicated Professional Mobile Radio (PMR) systems, or a complete deployment is foreseen if e-Triage is used abroad where no infrastructure is. This paper focuses on the technologies used to transmit data and voice traffc within the disaster area and to the remote control centers and hospitals. These technologies are GSM/GPRS, TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) and WLAN and are backhauled over satellite (BGAN or VSAT) or UMTS links. Some modifications of the protocols underneath have been implemented, which show better performance over slow and limited bandwidth links.