During disasters, the telecommunication infrastructure are usually heavily damaged or overloaded, which leads to serious disruptions in the warning and rescue operations. Similarly, part of the Japanese cellular Early Earthquake Warning (EEW) system were damaged during the March 11th earthquake and tsunami. This collaborative project proposes to study the disruption of emergency communications during the last disaster in Japan and investigate corresponding solutions. In particular, the project has the following three integrated objectives: 1) To study the cellular EEW system of Japan and its use in the March 11th earthquake in Japan; 2) To study the communication problems that were encountered leading to disruptions in warning and rescue operations; and 3) To explore tower-less phone-to-phone direct communication mode that can make the cellular phone communications much more resilient during disasters.
This project supports collection of data about communication disruptions in Japan; treatment of such data to better understand the impact of telecommunication failures; and finally, solutions how to enhance the cellular system with ad hoc communications. The project is a close collaboration among PIs inthe US, their collaborators in Japanese universities and cellular service providers in Japan.
The outcome of this project will lead to a deeper understanding of tradeoffs among robustness, simplicity, scalability, self-organization and adaptivity in designing a cellular emergency broadcast system for USA and beyond. The results of this project will have a direct and practical impact on developing an effective emergency warning system using the latest communication devices.
When emergency occurs, the network infrastructure is vulnerable to such emergencies and tend to be destroyed or partially destroyed, which renders the emergency districts disconnected to the outside world. Our findings based on this project are as follows: 1) Japan has a very sophisticated EEW system but does not use the latest capabilities of smart phones. US has no cellular warning system. 2) When cellular infrastructure is broken, Wi-Fi capabilities of the phones and private WiFi networks can be used to communicate warning in a trustworthy manner. 3) Information distribution before, during and after disaster are crucial to save lives. 4) In particular communication during disaster is very difficult, because the fast changing of conditions in field and in available communication networks and tools. 5) In particular, social networks are good tools to distribute timely important information. Social networks together with an ad hoc protocol, such that our proposed Adaptive Broadcast Protocol (ABP) is a very good combination to support communications during disaster situations. 6) Security is an important component of communication in disaster conditions; security requires much more attention in future research. 7) To implement an effective system for disaster situations we need to develop standards, regulations, and systems for cellular based emergency communications. 8) ABP guarantees the minimal overhead for transmission. This is very important, because during disasters, batteries might be very limited. 9) ABP self adapts to network load by changing the transmission range. In this way the collisions are minimized. This is also very important, because during disasters everyone tries to communicate and the communication channels are overloaded. 10) ABP can handle the overload by using priority of information.
