Disaster management communication networks: Challenges and architecture design

Abstract

In the past decades, serious natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and storms have occurred frequently worldwide with catastrophic consequences. They also helped us understand that organising and maintaining effective communication during the disaster are vital for the execution of rescue operations. As communication resources are often entirely or partially damaged by disasters, the demand for information and communication technology (ICT) services explosively increases just after the events. These situations instigate serious network traffic congestions and physical damage of ICT equipments and emergency ICT networks if uprooted as a pre-disaster network system. This article proposes a network architecture design by integrating the existing network infrastructure with the reinforcement of layers based techniques and cloud processing concepts. This resilient network architecture allows the ICT services to be launched within a reasonable short period of time of development. Furthermore, communication in a disaster is sustained by implementing a three-tier fortification of the overall network architecture which would also minimize the physical and logical redundancy for resilient and flexible ICT resources. As cloud processing will work as a parallel reinforced infrastructure, the proposed approach and network design will give new hope for the developing countries to consider cloud computing services for effectiveness and better dependability on the architecture to save ICT and humanitarian network at the time of disaster.