A survey on rapidly deployable solutions for post-disaster networks

Abstract

In post-disaster scenarios, e.g., after earthquakes or floods, the traditional communication infrastructure may be unavailable or seriously disrupted and overloaded; therefore, rapidly deployable network solutions are needed to restore connectivity and provide assistance to users and first responders in the incident area. This work surveys the solutions proposed to address the deployment of a network without any a priori knowledge about the communication environment for critical communications. The design of such a network should also allow for quick, flexible, scalable, and resilient deployment with minimal human intervention.

A survey of strategies for communication networks to protect against large-scale natural disasters

“…1) Rapid emergency communication network deployment: Emergency communication networks must ideally fulfil a set of requirements to provide and maintain sustainable communications [7]: resilience, basic service set provision, self-capabilities (such as self-organization, -optimization, -healing), node mobility, inter-operability, and compatibility with other heterogeneous undamaged network systems as well as low SWaP (size, weight and power). Two major categories Fig.…”

“…More recently, Miranda et al [7] presented a brief overview of the requirements for rapidly re-establishing connectivity and for providing levels of service adequate for emergency services. The COST CA15127 (RECODIS) Action is aimed to develop appropriate solutions to provide cost-efficient resilient communications in the presence of disaster-based disruptions, considering both existing and emerging communication network architectures.…”

A novel cross-layer framework for large scale emergency communications

“…Most research in resilient disaster communications covers networking solutions either describing the mobile response components, processes for restoring failed network cells or priority service functions in the public switched telephone networks using cellular networks after the disaster to rapidly bringing normal phone line back to the end users [13][14][15][16]25]. However, these are standalone solutions which are applied to separated networks and cannot be used for communication in more heterogeneous disaster scenarios.…”

“…Current solutions cannot cope with large-scale disaster scenarios. Emerging activities led by industry to alleviate post-disaster communications [13], such as Alcatel-Lucent Broadcast Message Centre, CISCO network emergency response vehicles or Ericsson WLAN emergency disaster response are short term solutions with short range coverage and are not applicable to isolated rural and large scale scenarios which are the focus of this paper.…”

Quantifying and minimizing the impact of disasters on wireless communications

“…Among the first body of works, [5,6] study the problem of localizing the victims of a disaster, using help messages [5] or social network posts [6], while [7] and [8] model, respectively, the generated traffic and the mobility of both victims and responders. With regard to enhancing the connectivity options during a disaster, [9,10] survey and compare the available hardware options, while [11,12] focus on scheduling and routing, and [10,13,14] discuss possible network architectures.…”