Prioritizing Capacity Building Strategies to Ensure Robustness and Faster Recovery of Cellular Networks from Hurricanes

This paper presents a regression-based approach for identifying the impact of county-level capacity building strategies on post-hurricane recovery pattern of cellular networks considering the impact of infrastructure interdependencies. The proposed approach models the recovery rate of the cellular network in a county, based on hurricane damage to cellular network, electricity grid, recovery of electricity grid, and the Baseline Resilience Index for Communities (BRIC). To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach, the recovery rate of the cellular network after Hurricane Ida was regressed on the set of predictors using a Tweedie regression. Historical data on the damage and recovery of the cellular network after Hurricane Ida was collected from the US Federal Communications Commission's reports. The recovery rate of the cellular network and the grid was calculated by fitting an exponential distribution to their recovery curves. The regression coefficients indicate statistically significant relationships between the recovery rate of the cellular network and the level of damage of the cellular network and grid, recovery rate of grid, and BRIC index. The coefficients could be used to estimate the effect of the capacity building strategies to maximize the rate of recovery of the hurricane-damaged cellular network.