Auto-scaling emergency call centres using cloud resources to handle disasters

Abstract

The fixed-line and mobile telephony network is one of the crucial elements of an emergency response to a disaster event. However, frequently the phone network is overwhelmed in such situations and is disrupted. It is not cost-effective to maintain an over-provisioned IT infrastructure for such rare events. Cloud computing allows users to create resources on-demand and can enable an IT infrastructure that scales in response to the demands of disaster management. In this paper, we introduce a system that uses the Amazon EC2 service to automatically scale up a software telephony network in response to a large volume of calls and scale down in normal times. We demonstrate the efficacy of this system through experiments based on real-world data.