Robust Networking and Information Collection

Project Lead: B. S. Manoj (UCSD)
Project Participants: G. Chockalingam (UCSD), R. Mishra (UCSD), B. Jafarian (UCSD), R. Rao (UCSD), J. Zhu (UCSD), S. Mehrotra (UCI), and N. Venkatasubramanian (UCI)
Project Team: 5 Students (2 for robust networking and 3 for information collection), 1 Post-doc, 2 Programmers 

Project Summary:

Our objective is to develop systems that provide computing, communication, and higher layer services at a crisis site. The site may lack electric power, fixed communication networks may be unpredictable, and responders might bring in heterogeneous mutually conflicting communication technologies. The goal is to develop a system that can operate under such extreme conditions by consolidating and enhancing available systems and seamlessly extending new capabilities to all end users and devices as communication services get incrementally restored.  Our approach will include development of new systems for local deployment as well as the leveraging of unaffected infrastructure adjacent to the crisis site. Data frequently collected for network management (e.g., traffic intensity, individual user location, population density) will be stored, tagged and made available to other higher level applications such as SAMI (described above).

Grand Challenges:

The grand challenge in this project is restoring computing, communication, and higher layer services at a crisis site in a manner that is focused on the needs and opportunities that arise proximate to the crisis (in both time and space dimensions.)  Commercial systems are often based on assumptions that fall apart during a crisis when large-scale loss of power, destruction of antenna masts and servers are common.  Commercial services also incorporate elements important for day-to-day business (such as the need to compete with other similar providers) that are largely irrelevant during a crisis. For this and other reasons, full restoration of commercial systems rarely occurs fast enough to support basic search and rescue missions or the securing of assets in the immediate aftermath of a crisis when the potential for saving survivors and surviving property is very high. Furthermore, self contained relief organizations that arrive at a crisis site often carry communication equipment that fail to interoperate, are inadequate for the operations and may even interfere with each other making the task of forming an ad-hoc organization harder. In summary, the challenge is to compose a solution to assist in crisis response that is designed to serve the dynamically evolving situation at the crisis site.

Project Focus:

The focus of this effort is not to invent an entirely new stand alone system which, if universally adopted, would provide robust services. Instead, to lower costs and leverage prior investments, our focus is to judiciously introduce systems into the field that bring some new capabilities but dynamically federate operational elements of preexisting systems at or adjacent to the crisis site on an ongoing basis. The goal is to deliver predictable services through architectural innovations that can support the management of heterogeneous systems. Furthermore, to support the overall mission of RESCUE we will develop innovative intelligent data collection mechanisms which glean information from the communication environment for use by other aspects of this effort.

Expected Results and Artifacts:

Expected outcomes of this project include: 1) development of a hybrid wireless networking system (including architectural design, protocol stack and control algorithm design, performance analysis and field experiments) to support operations at a crisis site; 2) developing a programmable hardware platforms for rapid transitioning of new research solutions to the field; 3) developing cross-layer techniques for dealing with surges and failures in existing and deployed communication infrastructures; 4) identifying approaches to extracting data from today’s deployed network that will be useful in emergency management and 5) design solutions that addresses tradeoffs of timeliness, accuracy and reliability in data collection from crisis network components.

Plans for Broader Impact and Outreach:

In order to achieve a broader impact, we have identified opportunities to test, evaluate and socialize the elements described above at drills and other persistent small-scale deployments. For example, the cellular phone based location tracking system is currently being tested for accuracy (and broader use in fleet management) through the UCSD campus shuttle system.  We are also exploring the use of the system in situations other than emergencies, such as Internet provisioning in rural areas, inexpensive community networking in residential areas, and bridging the digital divide in developing and underdeveloped countries. We plan to share these and other findings at multiple technology forums We also plan to develop a software simulation tool to study the survivability of cellular networks during large scale disasters such as earthquakes. This software simulation tool will be integrated with earthquake simulators such as INLET to study different networking solutions for disaster response.