Name-based replication priorities in disaster cases

Abstract

In the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, network infrastructure is likely to have suffered severe damages that challenge normal communications. In addition to that, traffic substantially increases as a result of people attempting to get in touch with friends, relatives or the rescue teams. To address such requirements of a challenged network, we propose a communication framework based on messages that exploits namebased replication of content and enables ad-hoc communications with spatial and temporal scoping and prioritisation of named messages. We evaluate our design against less sophisticated replication strategies and show that important messages (e.g., from first responders) get disseminated to more nodes than less important messages.

On information exposure through named content

“…As we showed in [11] for instance, time and space scoping can provide significant performance benefits. Name-based routing in case of infrastructureless environments takes the form of name-based replication, where messages are forwarded based on the information included in the message name.…”

“…For instance, host centric, IP-based communication, has been repeatedly shown to be a poor fit for mobile environments, while a content-centric, request-response model seems to be meeting the requirements of client mobility [10] and network fragmentation [11]. Examples of other networking environments include machine-to-machine, smart grid applications [12], the Internet of Things (IoT) [13], vehicular [14] or home networking [15].…”

“…In such cases, although some connectivity might still exist, networks often become fragmented. Local communication with neighbouring nodes (e.g., [20]) when networks get fragmented cannot be supported by the current host-centric communication model [11].…”

“…However, as discussed in Section III, scoping information could also be included. Spatial scopes can be represented in several different ways such as a radius around a set of coordinates <type=circle; pos=x,y;radius=r>, or global hierarchical map format, e.g.,<country/state/city/postal-code> [11]. Temporal scoping is usually expressed through some time-tolive (TTL) value.…”

“…In this approach baseline name-based forwarding can be performed at line speed, as the size of the name can remain fixed, regardless the networking environment. At the same time, devices of limited capacity can simply ignore the attributes of the data, letting more intelligent forwarding and/or caching decisions to be made by more powerful devices, or simply devices that have the required resources (e.g., memory) at the time of forwarding (i.e., this may vary in time) [11]. However, due to the variable size of the attributes list, advanced forwarding and caching decisions cannot be supported at line speed.…”