Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been used mainly to collect environmental data and send it to a base station. Routing protocols are needed to efficiently direct the information flows to the base station. Since sensor nodes have strict energy constraints, data gathering and communication schemes for WSNs need to be designed for an efficient utilization of the available resources. An emergency management scenario is investigated, where a sensor network is deployed as virtual lifeline when entering a building. In addition to navigation support, the virtual lifeline is also used for two purposes. Firstly, to exchange short voice messages between fire fighter and command post. For the communication between command post and fire fighter a fast and reliable routing protocol (EMRO) has been developed based on a broadcasting scheme. Secondly, for data gathering a network coding based algorithm has been designed. The feasibility of simultaneously using this virtual lifeline for data gathering and communications is investigated in this paper by means of simulation and real experiments. The resilience to packet loss and node failure, as well as the transmission delay are investigated by means of short voice messages for the communication part and temperature readings for data gathering.
