A survey of strategies for communication networks to protect against large-scale natural disasters

Abstract

Abstract-Recent natural disasters have revealed that emergency networks presently cannot disseminate the necessary disaster information, making it difficult to deploy and coordinate relief operations. These disasters have reinforced the knowledge that telecommunication networks constitute a critical infrastructure of our society, and the urgency in establishing protection mechanisms against disaster-based disruptions.Hence, it is important to have emergency networks able to maintain sustainable communication in disaster areas. Moreover, the network architecture should be designed so that network connectivity is maintained among nodes outside of the impacted area, while ensuring that services for costumers not in the affected area suffer minimal impact.As a first step towards achieving disaster resilience, the RE-CODIS project was formed, and its Working Group 1 members conducted a comprehensive literature survey on "strategies for communication networks to protect against large-scale natural disasters," which is summarized in this article.Index Terms-vulnerability, end-to-end resilience, natural disasters, disaster-based disruptions.

Shared Risk Link Group disjointness and geodiverse routing: A trade‐off between benefit and practical effort

“…The resilience to disasters is a challenging problem in today's telecommunication networks . Known risks of failure have to be taken into account in network planning and management, so that end‐to‐end connectivity may be guaranteed in the event of disasters, in particular in backbone networks . A set of links sharing a common risk of failure (for instance fibers sharing a cable or a duct) constitute a shared risk link group (SRLG).…”

Design/upgrade of a transparent optical network topology resilient to the simultaneous failure of its critical nodes

“…Large‐scale failures can seriously disrupt a telecommunications network due to either natural, technological or malicious human activities . Two recent surveys conducted within COST Action RECODIS are on strategies to protect networks against large‐scale natural disasters and on security challenges in communication networks. When dealing with large‐scale failures, it is important not only to recover from failures as quick as possible (the post‐disaster problem), but also to prepare the network to minimize the impact of such failures (the pre‐disaster problem).…”

SDN-based traffic engineering for improved resilience in integrated satellite-terrestrial backhaul networks

“…This is especially of interest in public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) efforts given the high dependability on communication systems for effective disaster mitigation [6]. One of the ways to minimize the network vulnerabilities in case of a disaster is introducing an appropriate redundancy within the network [6].…”

“…This is especially of interest in public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) efforts given the high dependability on communication systems for effective disaster mitigation [6]. One of the ways to minimize the network vulnerabilities in case of a disaster is introducing an appropriate redundancy within the network [6]. In this case, satellite capacity can be deployed as a redundant backhaul capacity to any network node and also may be available to operate in challenging post disaster scenarios, allowing rapid emergency communication network deployments as those based on vehicular or transportable network nodes (referred to as mobile cells) described in [6] e.g., base stations (BS).…”

“…One of the ways to minimize the network vulnerabilities in case of a disaster is introducing an appropriate redundancy within the network [6]. In this case, satellite capacity can be deployed as a redundant backhaul capacity to any network node and also may be available to operate in challenging post disaster scenarios, allowing rapid emergency communication network deployments as those based on vehicular or transportable network nodes (referred to as mobile cells) described in [6] e.g., base stations (BS). Satellite links could provide additional bandwidth to backup connectivity to critical cell sites as well as to divert traffic from congested areas so that the capacity in the terrestrial links could be supplemented during peak-times or even replaced in case of total/partial failures as well as for emergency mobile cell deployments.…”