Vehicles as Information Hubs During Disasters: Glueing Wi-Fi to TV White Space to Cellular Networks

This paper is a brief description of the small scale field demonstration we presented at the ITS World Congress 2013 in Tokyo. We showed that during disasters vehicles can act as information hubs conveying human or machine centric information from an area where the telecommunications network is disrupted, to an area where the telecommunications infrastructure is available. The demonstration was a combination of different means of communication technologies including Wi-Fi, TV white space, cellular networks, and the movement of the vehicles themselves. Use of the TV white space for inter-vehicle communications was the first trial carried out in any metropolitan area in the world.