Telecommunications in Disaster Areas [Hardcover]

Disasters occur in short time periods and are usually unexpected, leaving in their wake large numbers of casualties and severe infrastructure damages. These disasters can be due to natural causes (earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, epidemics, or combinations of thereof) or manmade (industrial accidents, terrorism, and war). Essential communications breakdown is one of the common characteristics of all disasters. By causing delays and errors in emergency response and disaster relief efforts, the partial or complete failure of telecommunications infrastructure leads to what might have been preventable loss of life and damage to property. Despite the increasing reliability and resiliency of modern telecommunications networks to physical damage, the risk associated with communications failures still remains serious due to the growing dependence upon these tools in emergency operations.

Affected areas need coordinated relief as soon as possible in order to minimize further nefarious effects. In such scenarios, it is vital that communications between interested parties, i.e. relief and security groups, are established as quickly and as easily as possible, ideally in a plug & play or zero configuration fashion. The acknowledgment that infrastructure-based networks in such deployment areas may be destroyed raises the need for new alternatives and communication paradigms, ideally infrastructure-less, and for decentralized wireless technologies.

Technical topics discussed in the book include:
System Engineering, Power, and Communication Infrastructure
Self-Organizing, Cognitive, and Location-aware Networks
Public Safety Scenarios Modelling
Inter-Network Interoperability
Networks of Mobile Robot Introduction
Systems Engineering Methodology for the Development of Disaster Tolerant Networks
Power Supply and Communications Infrastructure Issues in Disaster Areas