Architecture for responsive emergency communications networks

Lieser, Patrick; Álvarez, Flor; Gardner-Stephen, Paul; Hollick, Matthias; Boehnstedt, Doreen

doi:10.1109/ghtc.2017.8239239

Cited by 47 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 22 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Resilient Communications During disasters, communication infrastructure is often unavailable due to physical damage or overload by its users [34]. No network accesses hinders IDR operations such as search-and-rescue missions, which require up-to-date map data [3].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical insights for designing Information and Communication Technology for International Disaster Response

Stute

Maaß

Schons

et al. 2020

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Due to the increase in natural disasters in the past years, Disaster Response Organizations (DROs) are faced with the challenge of coping with more and larger operations. Currently appointed Information and Communications Technology (ICT) used for coordination and communication is sometimes outdated and does not scale, while novel technologies have the potential to greatly improve disaster response efficiency. To allow adoption of these novel technologies, ICT system designers have to take into account the particular needs of DROs and characteristics of International Disaster Response (IDR). This work attempts to bring the humanitarian and ICT communities closer together. In this work, we analyze IDR-related documents and conduct expert interviews. Using open coding, we extract empirical insights and translate the peculiarities of DRO coordination and operation into tangible ICT design requirements. This information is based on interviews with active IDR staff as well as DRO guidelines and reports. Ultimately, the goal of this paper is to serve as a reference for future ICT research endeavors to support and increase the efficiency of IDR operations.2 communication systems. To this end, we were in contact with 126 IDR experts and active staff (including 15 interviews) from 71 different national and international DROs who also provided pointers to official guidelines, reports, and other resources.This article is structured as follows: In the next section, we outline the body of related work. We present our methodology in Section 3. In Section 4, we present our empirical insights for ICT design. In particular, we introduce important terminology in Section 4.1. We then explain the organizational structure of DROs at the example of the United Nations (UN) in Section 4.2. We detail how different DROs coordinate on a global level in Section 4.3, and how a typical local IDR operation is coordinated and carried out in Section 4.4. Finally, we conclude in Section 5. Related workThe field literature refers to ICT for disaster response as crisis informatics, although the terms disaster, crisis, and emergency are often used interchangeably. Due to the growing number of crisis situations occurring across the world [20,25], the use of crisis communication and management via technology has gained in importance and been increasingly researched [46,47]. There are several challenges and obstacles in sharing and coordinating information during multi-agency disaster response [8].Research efforts have focused on describing the specific characteristics of emergencies and the resulting challenges and requirements for ICT support, for example, derived via case studies and interviews [11,37]. The conference for Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) was the first scientific venue for ICT-based crisis communication. Founded in 2004 by a group of scientists from various related fields, its aim was to address the issue of ICT support for effective [69] disaster management. One major work presented at the first meetin...

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empirical insights for designing Information and Communication Technology for International Disaster Response

Stute

Maaß

Schons

et al. 2020

International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Communication failure may occur in the majority of extreme event scenarios which provoke loss of lives and properties. 11 Also, the damage to CS along with the increase in traffic crossing the network disrupts relief operations. Thus, rescuers are not able to exchange information and people cannot communicate their position or ask for assistance, and the entire relief operation is hardly managed.…”

Section: Importance Of Communication Systems In He Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Case studies of communications systems during harsh environments: A review of approaches, weaknesses, and limitations to improve quality of service

Khaled

Mcheick

2019

International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The failure of communications systems may cause catastrophic damage to human life and economic activities as people are unable to communicate with each other in a timely manner and with a convenient quality of service. Therefore, the exchange of information is more than necessary for people in their everyday life or during harsh environments to prevent the death and injury of thousands of individuals. The study of communications systems behavior in harsh environments helps to design or select more resilient technologies that are capable of operating in challenging conditions. This article reviews existing approaches, major causes of failure, and weaknesses of communications systems during extreme events. First, we highlight the importance of communications systems, and then we examine related works, how communication may fail, and the effect of this failure on human life in general and during extreme events response. Furthermore, we study and analyze how communications are used during various stages of extreme events, and we identify the main weaknesses and limitations that communications systems may suffer based on many case studies. To conclude, we identify and discuss relevant attributes, requirements, and recommendations for communications systems to perform with a suitable quality of service during harsh environments and to reduce risks of communication failure in challenging conditions.The failure of CS is widely known to occur in almost all extreme conditions. The breakdown of TI, whether complete or partial, causes inefficiency and delays in emergency relief efforts and response, which leads to loss of life and preventable injuries. 10 Due to increasing dependence upon CS during extreme events, the risk of communication failure is high, despite increasing immunity and protection of these means against disasters, HE and calamities. An extreme event situation with a severely disrupted TI amplifies chaos and uncertainty.

show abstract

“…Some works do not pre-stamp the messages with priority levels, but compute the priority based on various parameters, e.g., the sender, the receiver, type or number of messages. For example, in [13], smaller messages are given higher priority.…”

Section: Popularity and Prioritymentioning

confidence: 99%

My Smartphone tattles: Considering Popularity of Messages in Opportunistic Data Dissemination

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Opportunistic networks have recently seen increasing interest in the networking community. They can serve a range of application scenarios, most of them being destination-less, i.e., without a-priori knowledge of who is the final destination of a message. In this paper, we explore the usage of data popularity for improving the efficiency of data forwarding in opportunistic networks. Whether a message will become popular or not is not known before disseminating it to users. Thus, popularity needs to be estimated in a distributed manner considering a local context. We propose KEETCHI, a data forwarding protocol based on Q-Learning to give more preference to popular data rather than less popular data. Our extensive simulation comparison between KEETCHI and the well known EPIDEMIC protocol shows that the network overhead of data forwarding can be significantly reduced while keeping the delivery rate the same.2 of 25 such data publicly available, as is already the case for a project in Canada [1]. In such cases, OppNets offer a good alternative, as they are free in terms of costs and accessible to everyone with minimal equipment (e.g., a smartphone).Much research effort has been invested recently in designing and evaluating data dissemination protocols for OppNets [2,3]. On the one hand, these protocols need to leverage at best, the mobility of people and the available communication opportunities (contacts) and, on the other hand, they need to minimise the overhead of communications. In general, there are two main communication scenarios for OppNets: destination-less and destination-oriented. The first scenario assumes that either all network participants should receive the message (e.g., storm warning or a big city event) or that the receivers are not known a-priori (e.g., all firefighters on duty). The second scenario assumes that the destinations are well known ahead. Below, we discuss that the first scenario is by far more important in OppNets, even though most of the research efforts have been invested in the second.The contributions of this paper are two-fold. Firstly, we introduce the concept of message popularity to data forwarding, where popular data are given higher preference when forwarding than less popular data. This is different from using priority, as popularity cannot be assessed before the data are received and evaluated (liked) by the people. Secondly, we introduce a novel data dissemination protocol called KEETCHI that exploits the popularity of data in destination-less scenarios by estimating it with Q-Learning. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficiency of KEETCHI through extensive simulations against EPIDEMIC [4], the best known protocol for destination-less OppNets.This paper is organised as follows. Section 2 provides background information in terms of application scenarios and implementation challenges. Section 3 is a review of existing destination-less OppNets forwarding protocols and the usage of popularity in a broader context. Section 4 defines popularity of messages. Section 5 provides a...

show abstract

Architecture for responsive emergency communications networks

Cited by 47 publications

References 22 publications

Empirical insights for designing Information and Communication Technology for International Disaster Response

Empirical insights for designing Information and Communication Technology for International Disaster Response

Case studies of communications systems during harsh environments: A review of approaches, weaknesses, and limitations to improve quality of service

My Smartphone tattles: Considering Popularity of Messages in Opportunistic Data Dissemination

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About