Evaluation of Peer-to-Peer Overlays for First Response

Efficient communication architectures are vital for handling larger scale first response scenarios, and existing mechanisms have several shortcomings due to the heterogeneity of first response groups. In this paper, we consider using peer-to-peer-based communication architectures for first response scenarios. We evaluated different network overlays in environments found in first response-like scenarios. A first response P2P system needs to address both, reliability in high chum situations in network infrastructure mode as well as reasonable usability in wireless ad-hoc networks. Our evaluation shows that a superpeer architecture based on peer capabilities has superior performance when compared with purely unstructured or DHT-based overlays.