Communications Assistance Technology over Ad-Hoc Networks (CATAN)

CATAN is an emergency communication system that can be deployed without other supporting infrastructure to assist an affected population report status information, receive information about the status of others, and communicate with relief personnel following a disaster. CATAN supplements existing tools such as Google Person Finder by providing a direct method of collecting and transmitting volunteered data from an affected site suffering a loss in connectivity.

CATAN is designed to bridge multiple wireless communication technologies using a mesh of portable "nodes". The nodes provide a web based user interface through Wi-Fi radios and (optionally) GPRS radios. They can optionally be configured to provide an SMS based user interface. The user interface allows users to report a basic set of status information that would be relevant to connecting with loved ones and assisting disaster responders. The nodes synchronize information via a custom peer-to-peer networking protocol. CATAN is designed to be agnostic to the data link used to communicate between peer nodes. The current implementation includes code to utilize UDP packets over a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi mesh network. It also provides code to link the nodes via amateur radios using the AX25 protocol. In order to disseminate information beyond the peer-to-peer network, CATAN provides the ability for a gateway node that has access to the Internet to upload data to an instance of Google Person Finder.

The core CATAN services are written in Python and designed to run in Linux on a Raspberry Pi device. The web base front end is written in PHP and also runs on the Raspberry Pi. The CATAN project includes software that augments the Wi-Fi router firmware (provided by the Broadband-Hamnet) to allow network flooding and code that interacts with OpenBTS to implement the SMS interface Also included are design files for 3D printing an enclosure for the node components.

The advantage of CATAN is its use of commodity off the shelf components to provide an emergency communication infrastructure at a minimal cost. It is designed to interoperate with the wireless communication devices that survivors of a disaster are likely to have access to. This type of technology should be of interest to the humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HADR) community.

For more information check out our presentation at ICCM 2014 or publication at GHTC 2015.

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