The Role of the Internet of Things in Network Resilience

Disasters lead to devastating structural damage not only to buildings and transport infrastructure, but also to other critical infrastructure, such as the power grid and communication backbones. Following such an event, the availability of minimal communication services is however crucial to allow efficient and coordinated disaster response, to enable timely public information, or to provide individuals in need with a default mechanism to post emergency messages. The Internet of Things consists in the massive deployment of heterogeneous devices, most of which battery-powered, and interconnected via wireless network interfaces. Typical IoT communication architectures enables such IoT devices to not only connect to the communication backbone (i.e. the Internet) using an infrastructure-based wireless network paradigm, but also to communicate with one another autonomously, without the help of any infrastructure, using a spontaneous wireless network paradigm. In this paper, we argue that the vast deployment of IoT-enabled devices could bring benefits in terms of data network resilience in face of disaster. Leveraging their spontaneous wireless networking capabilities, IoT devices could enable minimal communication services (e.g. emergency micro-message delivery) while the conventional communication infrastructure is out of service. We identify the main challenges that must be addressed in order to realize this potential in practice. These challenges concern various technical aspects, including physical connectivity requirements, network protocol stack enhancements, data traffic prioritization schemes, as well as social and political aspects

Why Information Matters: A Foundation for Resilience

Embracing Change: The Critical Role of Information, a research project by the Internews' Center for Innovation & Learning, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, combines Internews' longstanding effort to highlight the important role ofinformation with Rockefeller's groundbreaking work on resilience. The project focuses on three major aspects:- Building knowledge around the role of information in empowering communities to understand and adapt to different types of change: slow onset, long-term, and rapid onset / disruptive;- Identifying strategies and techniques for strengthening information ecosystems to support behavioral adaptation to disruptive change; and- Disseminating knowledge and principles to individuals, communities, the private sector, policymakers, and other partners so that they can incorporate healthy information ecosystems as a core element of their social resilience strategies

Spatially self-organized resilient networks by a distributed cooperative mechanism

The robustness of connectivity and the efficiency of paths are incompatible in many real networks. We propose a self-organization mechanism for incrementally generating onion-like networks with positive degree-degree correlations whose robustness is nearly optimal. As a spatial extension of the generation model based on cooperative copying and adding shortcut, we show that the growing networks become more robust and efficient through enhancing the onion-like topological structure on a space. The reasonable constraint for locating nodes on the perimeter in typical surface growth as a self-propagation does not affect these properties of the tolerance and the path length. Moreover, the robustness can be recovered in the random growth damaged by insistent sequential attacks even without any remedial measures.Comment: 34 pages, 12 figures, 2 table

Technology-related disasters:a survey towards disaster-resilient software defined networks

Resilience against disaster scenarios is essential to network operators, not only because of the potential economic impact of a disaster but also because communication networks form the basis of crisis management. COST RECODIS aims at studying measures, rules, techniques and prediction mechanisms for different disaster scenarios. This paper gives an overview of different solutions in the context of technology-related disasters. After a general overview, the paper focuses on resilient Software Defined Networks

How can we use mobile apps for disaster communications in Taiwan: Problems and possible practice

The growth rate of global smart phone in 2010 is as high as 78.1%, showing that smart phone gradually becomes the mainstream in the mobile phone market. Smart phone has the function of installing applications, provides users with more diversified mobile value-added services and will change users' communication habits in the future. Mobile communication follows the development trend of 3G and WiMAX, make users can link with mobile software stores through internet, downloading all kinds of applications, which has provided human beings with more diversified information, and gradually changed people's living habits. With the widespread of smart phone in Taiwan and many mobile applications start to go popular in market, people are crazy about downloading mobile applications, and different applications create different types of communications. Within a trend of smart phone and massive mobile apps go popular in Taiwan, what can we do to apply these tools for disaster communications? And compare to other infrastructure-level support, is mobile app a feasible route for disaster communications? What is the possible uses and challenges. --

Global Risks 2012, Seventh Edition

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks 2012 report is based on a survey of 469 experts from industry, government, academia and civil society that examines 50 global risks across five categories. The report emphasizes the singular effect of a particular constellation of global risks rather than focusing on a single existential risk. Three distinct constellations of risks that present a very serious threat to our future prosperity and security emerged from a review of this year's set of risks. Includes a special review of the important lessons learned from the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and the subsequent nuclear crisis at Fukushima, Japan. It focuses on therole of leadership, challenges to effective communication in this information age and resilient business models in response to crises of unforeseen magnitude

Architecture design for disaster resilient management network using D2D technology

Huge damages from natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, landslide, tsunamis, have been reported in recent years, claiming many lives, rendering millions homeless and causing huge financial losses worldwide. The lack of effective communication between the public rescue/safety agencies, rescue teams, first responders and trapped survivors/victims makes the situation even worse. Factors like dysfunctional communication networks, limited communications capacity, limited resources/services, data transformation and effective evaluation, energy, and power deficiency cause unnecessary hindrance in rescue and recovery services during a disaster. The new wireless communication technologies are needed to enhance life-saving capabilities and rescue services. In general, in order to improve societal resilience towards natural catastrophes and develop effective communication infrastructure, innovative approaches need to be initiated to provide improved quality, better connectivity in the events of natural and human disasters. In this thesis, a disaster resilient network architecture is proposed and analysed using multi-hop communications, clustering, energy harvesting, throughput optimization, reliability enhancement, adaptive selection, and low latency communications. It also examines the importance of mode selection, power management, frequency and time resource allocation to realize the promises of Long-term Evolution (LTE) Device to Device (D2D) communication. In particular, to support resilient and energy efficient communication in disaster-affected areas. This research is examined by thorough and vigorous simulations and validated through mathematical modelling. Overall, the impact of this research is twofold: i) it provides new technologies for effective inter- and intra-agency coordination system during a disaster event by establishing a stronger and resilient communication; and ii) It offers a potential solution for stakeholders such as governments, rescue teams, and general public with new informed information on how to establish effective policies to cope with challenges before, during and after the disaster events

SZEROKOPASMOWE SATELITARNE SIECI DANYCH W KONTEKŚCIE DOSTĘPNYCH PROTOKOŁÓW I PLATFORM CYFROWYCH

Satellites are the transmission medium for providing connectivity and building global, continental, or regional networks around the world (satellite operators effectively use satellites to support Internet traffic), and point-to-point connections are also possible. In practical use, there are combinations of VSAT networks with terrestrial wireless extensions, allowing end users to increase the capabilities offered via satellite. This paper provides selected information on broadband satellite networks using VSAT technology, including available protocols and transmission platforms. The aim of the article is also to present the chosen technical aspects of satellite networks working with the usage of VSAT technology.Satelity stanowią medium transmisyjne dla zapewnienia łączności i budowy sieci globalnych, kontynentalnych czy regionalnych na całym świecie (operatorzy satelitarni efektywnie wykorzystują satelity do obsługi ruchu internetowego), przy czym możliwe są także połączenia typu punkt-punkt. W praktycznym użyciu są kombinacje sieci VSAT z bezprzewodowymi rozszerzeniami naziemnymi, co pozwala zwiększyć użytkownikom końcowym możliwości oferowane za pośrednictwem satelity. W artykule zamieszczono wybrane informacje na temat szerokopasmowych sieci satelitarnych z wykorzystaniem technologii VSAT, z uwzględnieniem dostępnych protokołów i platform transmisyjnych. Celem artykułu jest także przedstawienie wybranych aspektów technicznych sieci satelitarnych pracujących z wykorzystaniem technologii VSAT