CNS

Disaster management critically depends on timely and efficient communication. To better deal with an incident, authorities from different services (e.g., fire, police) and jurisdictions need to work together in a new dynamically created team, different from their original organizational/administrative 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 individual(s) to send to, information cannot reach the right people, delaying rescue efforts. We propose CNS, leveraging the benefits of ICN to provide 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 information on a timely basis, with senders addressing the recipients based on their roles. Predefined namespace templates for disaster types minimize management overhead for establishing communication. We also find the need for a new enhanced forwarding rule to support such a recipient hierarchy. We have developed a prototype demonstrating feasibility 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 simplified operations, appropriate prioritization and security.