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A proposed wireless-communication and data-processing system would exploit recent advances in Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) services and software to establish information lifelines between firefighters in a burning building and a fire chief at a control station nearby, but outside the building.

As reported by Charles Jorgensen and John Schipper at NASA's Ames Research Center and Bradley Betts of Computer Science Corp., RFID tags would be dropped by firefighters at numerous locations while moving through a burning building. The tags would serve as waypoint marks that would be interrogated by an RFID transceiver unit carried by the firefighter. In addition, the RFID tags would also relay sensory and position data to the control station outside the building.

In a typical scenario, as firefighters moved through a building, they would scatter many RFID tags into smoke-obscured areas by using a compressed-air gun. The RFID tags could be of different types, operating at different frequencies to identify their functions, and possibly respond by emitting audible beeps when activated by signals transmitted by transceiver units carried by nearby firefighters. The system would include a transceiver unit and a computer at the control station and portable transceiver units carried by the firefighters in the building.

Each RFID tag, with dimensions of a few centimeters, would include standard RFID circuitry and possibly sensors for measuring relevant environmental parameters such as temperature, levels of light and sound, concentration of oxygen, concentrations of hazardous chemicals in smoke, and/or levels of nuclear radiation.

It would be necessary to distribute the RFID tags densely enough to ensure reliable communication. A typical RFID of a type now commercially available is a passive device that operates at a carrier frequency of about 433 MHz and can communicate with other RFIDs, using one of several standard serial digital-data-communication protocols, over a distance of approximately 20 feet. In the proposed system, supplementary units could be dispersed along with the RFID tags to increase signal power sufficiently to ensure communication with firefighter's transceiver units and/or with the control station.