A Human-Centric Cloud and Fog-Assisted IoT Platform for Disaster Management

Natural and man-made disasters pose an ever-present threat to our community and society. Effective information and communication platform are important for disaster response. However, under disaster scenarios, network infrastructure, such as power grid, cellular tower and backbone networks can be damaged. In addition, the communication channels often become congested by exceptionally high levels of data traffic, as people impacted by the disaster are trying to contact with their family and friends and seeking for help; disaster responders are working to deploy rescue resources, and lots of citizens are broadcasting the disaster by uploading pictures or videos. In this paper, we propose an emergency information platform that is suitable for a challenged environment where the traditional communication paradigms either completely fail or poorly perform. We utilize the vast deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) and citizens in the community to bring benefits in terms of data network resilience in face of disaster. In particular, we propose a software-defined communication network that combines IoT technology, Fog computing, Cloud computing, peer-to-peer computing and delay-tolerant network together to enable an effective emergency-response information platform. It integrates the power of community, and citizen with IoT devices and existing partially damaged communication platform to address critical disaster communication problems.