CNS: Content-oriented Notification Service for Managing Disasters

Abstract

Disaster management critically depends on timely and effi- cient communication. To better deal with an incident, au- thorities from different services ( e.g. , fire, police) and juris- dictions need to work together in a new dynamically created team, different from their original organizational/administra- tive hierarchy. Unfortunately, existing solutions ( e.g. , IP, or traditional telephony) are not well-suited to deal with such group communication due to the dynamic binding between roles and individuals, and mobility. A significant burden is placed on administrators to just establish and maintain necessary channels, distracting them from restoring order. To make things worse, since senders do not know which in- dividual(s) to send to, information cannot reach the right people, delaying rescue efforts. We propose CNS, leveraging the benefits of ICN to pro- vide the essential communication for efficiently managing disasters. We first design a namespace enabling dynamic creation and evolution of incident related (sub-)namespaces to represent roles of first responders assigned to the disaster. This allows first responders to receive the appropriate infor- mation on a timely basis, with senders addressing the recip- ients based on their roles. Predefined namespace templates for disaster types minimize management overhead for estab- lishing communication. We also find the need for a new en- hanced forwarding rule to support such a recipient hierarchy. We have developed a prototype demonstrating feasibil- ity and efficiency. With the help of large-scale simulations and real-world disaster traces, we compare CNS with an IP- based solution. CNS can significantly reduce network load and latency in addition to the qualitative benefits of simpli- fied operations, appropriate prioritization and security.