15,570 research outputs found
Enabling Disaster Resilient 4G Mobile Communication Networks
The 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the cellular technology expected to
outperform the previous generations and to some extent revolutionize the
experience of the users by taking advantage of the most advanced radio access
techniques (i.e. OFDMA, SC-FDMA, MIMO). However, the strong dependencies
between user equipments (UEs), base stations (eNBs) and the Evolved Packet Core
(EPC) limit the flexibility, manageability and resiliency in such networks. In
case the communication links between UEs-eNB or eNB-EPC are disrupted, UEs are
in fact unable to communicate. In this article, we reshape the 4G mobile
network to move towards more virtual and distributed architectures for
improving disaster resilience, drastically reducing the dependency between UEs,
eNBs and EPC. The contribution of this work is twofold. We firstly present the
Flexible Management Entity (FME), a distributed entity which leverages on
virtualized EPC functionalities in 4G cellular systems. Second, we introduce a
simple and novel device-todevice (D2D) communication scheme allowing the UEs in
physical proximity to communicate directly without resorting to the
coordination with an eNB.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Magazin
UAV-Empowered Disaster-Resilient Edge Architecture for Delay-Sensitive Communication
The fifth-generation (5G) communication systems will enable enhanced mobile
broadband, ultra-reliable low latency, and massive connectivity services. The
broadband and low-latency services are indispensable to public safety (PS)
communication during natural or man-made disasters. Recently, the third
generation partnership project long term evolution (3GPPLTE) has emerged as a
promising candidate to enable broadband PS communications. In this article,
first we present six major PS-LTE enabling services and the current status of
PS-LTE in 3GPP releases. Then, we discuss the spectrum bands allocated for
PS-LTE in major countries by international telecommunication union (ITU).
Finally, we propose a disaster resilient three-layered architecture for PS-LTE
(DR-PSLTE). This architecture consists of a software-defined network (SDN)
layer to provide centralized control, an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) cloudlet
layer to facilitate edge computing or to enable emergency communication link,
and a radio access layer. The proposed architecture is flexible and combines
the benefits of SDNs and edge computing to efficiently meet the delay
requirements of various PS-LTE services. Numerical results verified that under
the proposed DR-PSLTE architecture, delay is reduced by 20% as compared with
the conventional centralized computing architecture.Comment: 9,
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
Planning UAV Activities for Efficient User Coverage in Disaster Areas
Climate changes brought about by global warming as well as man-made
environmental changes are often the cause of sever natural disasters. ICT,
which is itself responsible for global warming due to its high carbon
footprint, can play a role in alleviating the consequences of such hazards by
providing reliable, resilient means of communication during a disaster crisis.
In this paper, we explore the provision of wireless coverage through UAVs
(Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to complement, or replace, the traditional
communication infrastructure. The use of UAVs is indeed crucial in emergency
scenarios, as they allow for the quick and easy deployment of micro and pico
cellular base stations where needed. We characterize the movements of UAVs and
define an optimization problem to determine the best UAV coverage that
maximizes the user throughput, while maintaining fairness across the different
parts of the geographical area that has been affected by the disaster. To
evaluate our strategy, we simulate a flooding in San Francisco and the car
traffic resulting from people seeking safety on higher ground
Cognitive Connectivity Resilience in Multi-layer Remotely Deployed Mobile Internet of Things
Enabling the Internet of things in remote areas without traditional
communication infrastructure requires a multi-layer network architecture. The
devices in the overlay network are required to provide coverage to the underlay
devices as well as to remain connected to other overlay devices. The
coordination, planning, and design of such two-layer heterogeneous networks is
an important problem to address. Moreover, the mobility of the nodes and their
vulnerability to adversaries pose new challenges to the connectivity. For
instance, the connectivity of devices can be affected by changes in the
network, e.g., the mobility of the underlay devices or the unavailability of
overlay devices due to failure or adversarial attacks. To this end, this work
proposes a feedback based adaptive, self-configurable, and resilient framework
for the overlay network that cognitively adapts to the changes in the network
to provide reliable connectivity between spatially dispersed smart devices. Our
results show that if sufficient overlay devices are available, the framework
leads to a connected configuration that ensures a high coverage of the mobile
underlay network. Moreover, the framework can actively reconfigure itself in
the event of varying levels of device failure.Comment: To appear in IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom 2017
Architecting the cyberinfrastructure for National Science Foundation Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI)
The NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is a networked ocean
research observatory with arrays of instrumented water column moorings and
buoys, profilers, gliders and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) within different
open ocean and coastal regions. OOI infrastructure also includes a cabled
array of instrumented seafloor platforms and water column moorings on the
Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. This networked system of instruments, moored and
mobile platforms, and arrays will provide ocean scientists, educators and the
public the means to collect sustained, time-series data sets that will enable examination
of complex, interlinked physical, chemical, biological, and geological
processes operating throughout the coastal regions and open ocean. The seven
arrays built and deployed during construction support the core set of OOI multidisciplinary
scientific instruments that are integrated into a networked software
system that will process, distribute, and store all acquired data. The OOI
has been built with an expectation of operation for 25 years.Peer Reviewe
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