## 4 Use Case: Application Scenario
### Wildfire Characteristics  
Often in a forest reserve or wild-land, there is frequent surveillance from towers, ground, and aerial patrols for wildfire. Sometimes, there is a fleet of airplanes regularly patrolling over the forest looking out for wildfires or for any abrupt changes in the environmental conditions that could trigger a fire event at various time intervals of the day or week, especially in fire-prone regions such as in Australia, Greece, Alabama, _etc_. In addition, the public can often report wildfires 24 h a day through a toll-free telephone system. When a fire is reported, a dispatch center sends fire-fighters and volunteer fire departments as needed to suppress it.  
In this instance, there are normally two stages: (1) a fire alarm is triggered either manually or automatically and (2) a rescue operation is initiated to suppress it. In the former case, environmental variables such as air temperature, the wind speed, humidity and atmospheric pressure are monitored. One of the most monitored characteristics is the air temperature, often of particular interest is the range between 40 \({}^{\circ}\)C to 46 \({}^{\circ}\)C, termed the \"emergency zone\". In this zone, there is the possibility for the alarm to be set-off and/or a trigger of immediate observation of the environment.  
In the latter stage, assuming an alarm is set-off, combating the situation is non-trivial, especially in a case of \"series of bushfires\"; this could continue for days before it is eventually suppressed completely. At this stage lots of efforts are put in place, the ability to combat the bushfire will increase the number of lives and amount of property that can be salvaged including the lives of the fire-fighters. For example, in some circumstances where several homes are threatened by a wildfire, the Forestry Commission can call-in helicopters with large water buckets. These buckets do not put out the fire, but reduce its intensity so that the fire-fighters can more easily suppress it. The helicopter service is extremely expensive and it is only employed in severe fire conditions. An early warning system that can provide continuous updates, with an accurate view of the incident as the fire-fighters battle on, is very crucial to the successful operation of combating the fire incident.  
The Alabama Forestry Commission [59] argued that an integrated approach of multiple systems can be used to merge satellite data, aerial imagery, and personnel position via a Global Positioning System (GPS) into a collective whole for near real-time wireless interaction with the Incident Command Centers (ICC). We believe that the use of WSNs together with these systems is crucial, as they are useful in providing localized and ground information to the other systems. A complete solution including an early warning system that reports a wildfire right from the on-set is, crucial. The use of wireless sensor networks could play a very important role in such an operation.  
We devote the next section to describe how the SWIFTNET design framework can be applied to a wildfire monitoring application, followed by the discussion of a real test-bed implementation.