The Information Society Technologies (IST) EUROPCOM project designs and develops an Ultra-WideBand (UWB)-based ad hoc network for search and rescue operations in disaster zones, especially indoors. The primary application of the EUROPCOM system is to provide position tracking of rescue personnel within the disaster zone. Currently no such technologies or systems exist, which can provide the envisaged functionality. The paper presents the network architecture that was proposed in the EUROPCOM project. The network architecture defines new physical entities and includes a complete protocol stack - from the physical layer up to the application layer. Each protocol layer was tailor-made to the operational constraints and requirements of the EUROPCOM system. The resulting protocol layers are lightweight, self- adaptive, bandwidth- and energy-efficient.

In a localized routing algorithm, node A currently holding the message forwards it based on the location of itself, its neighboring nodes and destination. We propose to use depth first search (DFS) method for routing decisions. Each node A, upon receiving the message for the first time, sorts all its neighbors according to a criteria such as their distance to destination and uses that order in DFS algorithm. It is the first localized algorithm that guarantees delivery for (connected) wireless networks modeled by arbitrary graphs, including inaccurate location information. We then propose the first localized QoS routing algorithm for wireless networks. It performs DFS routing algorithm after edges with insufficient bandwidth or insufficient connection time are deleted from the graph, and attempts to minimize hop count. This is also the first paper to apply GPS in QoS routing decisions, and to consider the connection time (estimated lifetime of a link) as a QoS criterion. The average length of measured QoS path in our experiments, obtained by DFS method, was between 1 and 1.34 times longer than the length of QoS path obtained by shortest path algorithm. The overhead is considerably reduced by applying the concept of internal nodes.