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Communications Technology Laboratory

Public Safety Communications Research Division

ReDiCom: Resilient Communications for Dynamic First Responder Teams in Disasters

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ReDiCom_On-Demand Session
ReDiCom_On-Demand Session
Effective communication among first responders during and in the aftermath of a disaster can affect outcomes dramatically. We are building a resilient architecture that allows first responders to communicate even with: (i) damage to infrastructure – civilian and/or specialized communication facilities may be damaged by the disaster, (ii) congested channels – because affected people report something about the disaster, and these messages may be broadcast, (iii) dynamically formed groups – first responder teams may be formed dynamically in response to a disaster and team member addresses (e.g., phone numbers) may not be known to one another, (iv) impediments to communication – because the new command chain to manage the disaster may be different from the original organizational hierarchy, (v) poor interoperability – each sub-team might use different communication facilities, and (vi) security attacks – disaster situations are often vulnerable to attacks, requiring authentication and authorization as well as establishing data integrity and provenance.We have developed a resilient network architecture that allows efficient communication among first responders during and after a disaster. We support dynamically formed groups for incident response, allowing first responders to securely and conveniently communicate based on roles (names), rather than network addresses. The architecture addresses the needs identified above for communication in disasters by (i) building resilience into the framework across all the layers, (ii) creating a framework that allows communication by role and identity, rather than addresses, (iii) supporting multiple modalities (data, voice, video) for communication among dynamically formed first responder teams, and (iv) providing robust and resilient communication and computing even when facilities are error- and disruption-prone.In this session, we will focus on the progress we have made in the last year, which includes Scalable namespace propagation across fragmented and disconnected networks;The design and implementation of an approach for first responders to update the current situation on offline maps on their (potentially disconnected devices) and a protocol to ensure delivery and consistency of the data across multiple users;Design and implementation of a dynamic routing protocol that can work with heterogeneous device-to-device (D2D) communication links and tolerate disconnections and partitions in the underlying wireless network topology,Modeling and analysis of public crowdsourced data to predict the potential impact of disasters on the cellular communication infrastructure,The design of secure coded computation in adverse environments,Robust and resilient communication over intermittently connected D2D communication links with infrastructure support,Design and implementation of the new ReDiCom modularized architecture,A new map functionality to help first responders communicate and mark based on geo-locations, andText-to-speech capability to further improve the communication efficiency in ReDiCom.

Speakers

  • Dr. K.K. Ramakrishnan, University of California - Riverside
  • Dr. Murat Yuksel, University of California - Riverside
  • Dr. Hulya Seferoglu, University of California - Riverside
  • Dr. Jiachen Chen, University of California - Riverside

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Created May 19, 2020, Updated October 28, 2020