Quantifying and minimizing the impact of disasters on wireless communications

Abstract

Communication networks are often disrupted during emergency situations, which can make relief operations slower, riskier, and less effective. In this context, our paper has the twofold purpose of (i) quantifying how significant such disruptions are, and (ii) evaluating the best strategies to minimize them. For both tasks, we leverage a set of real-world, crowd-sourced traces, including information on the position and connectivity (cellular and Wi-Fi) of thousands of smartphone users across the United States. Through our analysis, we find that enabling device-to-device communications can be extremely beneficial in dense urban centers, while including Wi-Fi access points in the safety network is the best strategy in suburban areas.