Ahsan Saleem (Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland), Andrei Costin (Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyvaskyla, Finland), Guillermo Suarez-Tangil (IMDEA Networks Institute, Madrid, Spain)
In this work, we present the crowdsourcing and mapping of COSPAS-SARSAT 406 MHz distress signals, making distress data and information openly available to researchers and practitioners. The standard COSPAS-SARSAT 406 MHz distress system relies on centralized and officially operated satellites and ground stations, and no comparable (open-science/open-data) crowdsourcing and mapping networks exist. To complement this, we propose a decentralized and publicly available crowdsourcing and mapping system for 406 MHz distress signals, enabling the independent research community to investigate the capacity, efficiency, applications, and security of these systems using real-world distress signals. We performed experiments on a limited and small scale to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed system and provided possible applications and future extensions of our proposed approach.