Emergency refers to an immediate risk posed to life, health, environment, or asset. Emergency has no calendar and one can come across any sort of such situation anywhere, at any time. Whether in the form of an accident, terrorism, robbery, kidnapping, fire breaking out, building collapse, murder. It has become urgent to have a simplistic and quick way to notifying the concerned department to deal with the disaster. Emergency management depends a lot on how quickly and exactly the situation is notified to the right people. With today's age of advancements in smart phone technology, it is more efficient to utilize the technology for emergency management. Mobile cloud computing adds more capabilities to create sophisticated services [1] [2] [3], [5], [6].
Currently available mechanisms do not efficiently handle emergency notification mechanism [2], [3]. Most of the processes prevailing around the world require the victim or witness to decide the type of emergency first and then find out which departments must be contacted. For example, in case of an accident, ambulance and police have to be called. Manually finding out the contact numbers and departments is not only inefficient, but also, at the time of emergency, it creates panic and affects rational thinking process. This could cost life as well.
Cloud computing, along with Fog computing, can play a very vital role in not only emergency alert process, but also, in the overall emergency management. Cloud computing platform provides vastly manageable and scalable virtual servers, computing resources storage resources, virtual networks, and network bandwidth, according to the requisite and affordability of customer. It also provides solution to process distributed content. Moreover, data can be accessed far and wide devoid of the trouble of keeping large storage and computing devices. Large amount of content can also be shared and collaborated easily with cloud computing.