Disaster Recovery & CUWiN...

Two recent blogs, one by Phil Windley and the other by W. David Stephenson comment on the possibilities for utilizing ad-hoc networks (and CUWiN, in particular) for responding to situations like Hurricane Katrina.

Interestingly enough, over two years ago (back in 2003) CUWiN partnered with a local hospital to put in a grant application to the Federal Government to build this exact type of ad-hoc networking system. CUWiN would have made it all open source and freely available to anyone in need -- unfortunately the idea was not funded. In a nutshell, mobile wireless CUWiN nodes (run on batteries -- current solid-state CUWiN nodes run on anywhere from 2-14 watts of electricity depending on the hardware) would be deployed in key locations to form a mesh infrastructure; and wireless-equiped Palm Pilots would be used to virally update first responders with needed information in rapidly changing disaster recovery situations.

It took me some time to track down the original notes (in all of their chickenscratch grandeur); but here it is:

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