Shadow phone: context aware device replication for disaster management

Thanks to portability and proliferation of mobile devices, these devices have been used in many disaster management systems to deliver disaster alerts and to assist disaster rescue. These systems provide general information of disaster events and broadcast to all the users. This approach adopts one-way communication model in which information is always transferred from server-side to client-side. In this work, we design and implement a context-aware synchronization framework to better utilize mobile devices for disaster management. To achieve this goal, it requires lots of computing power to customize alert information for large-numbers of users. Therefore, cloud computing is the technology that contributes to this goal. In this work, the proposed framework provides two important features: (1) context-aware transmission policy which controls how to transmit data efficiently according to data priority, battery level and network data rate; (2) an architecture that supports different mobile interactive applications in which clients and servers can interact with each other in an autonomic manner. Compared to Dropbox-like transmission scheme, the context-aware transmission protocol can prolong battery lifetime for up to seven times and increase the amount of transmission for up to seven times. Moreover, this scheme is not limited to single type of disaster scenario.