Resilient Communication for Dynamic First Responder Teams in Disaster Management

Effective communication among first responders during and in the aftermath of a disaster can dramatically affect outcomes - saving lives by providing appropriate, timely assistance. In this article, we discuss the design of a resilient architecture that enables effective first responder communications in the challenging situations caused by a disaster. Our ReDiCom (Resilient Disaster Communications) architecture builds resilience into its framework across all the layers. The information layer allows communication by roles and identities instead of addresses to support communication among dynamically formed first responder teams. The network layer provides robust and resilient communication even when facilities are error- and disruption-prone. Our coded computation further improves resilience and enables efficient distributed data processing potentially with first responder and civilian mobile devices.