Telecommunication networks play an essential role in the framework of the modern society, that becomes particularly crucial in the case of an emergency and/or of special events.
Ideal Public Safety and Disaster Relief involves the immediate availability of computing and network resources located in the proximity of the Incident Area or directly accessible from there. Unfortunately current emergency networks use technologies that only offer narrow-band capabilities and in major disasters or during big events existing infrastructures are often either disrupted or congested and fail to provide the necessary support. Next-generation emergency networks should provide a real quantum leap in terms of network throughput, users¿ Quality of Service (QoS), resilience and availability guarantees. Moreover they should be integrated with the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure, so that computing resources are provisioned when and where necessary with a large degree of flexibility and dynamicity.
Indeed advances in the wireless technology and in the mobile networking within the 5G framework will bring answers to the aforementioned issues. Nonetheless an architectural shift is also needed to make the whole infrastructure more flexible and autonomic and that new technologies such as virtualization and cloud computing, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) can support such shift.
The project aims at investigating the capability of SDN, NFV, virtualization and cloud computing to support novel, more powerful and more effective Public Safety and Disaster Relief (PSDR) network architectures.
The project is organized in three Workpages (WP). In WP1, we will define the network architecture based on the NFV/SDN technology. We will develop in WP2 some algorithms in order to orchestrate the computing and bandwidth resources. Finally an experimental test-bed will be developed in WP3.
The vast majority of the research developed to date on Public Safety and Disaster Relief (PSDR) networks has been devoted to the topic of network restoration when the disaster occurs, assuming it may annihilate or partially damage the existing terrestrial networks. The focus has been on the necessity of re-establishing the communication system for the support of public safety and disaster relief (PSDR) officers in providing essential services, aid, and reconciliation for communities in affected areas. For instance, rapidly deployable network architectures have been designed and demonstrated. Most proposals are based on definition and experimental validation of portable mobile networks in which all of the mobile network elements (i.e. eNodeBs, MME, HSS, SGW,¿ for LTE networks) are implemented on portable devices and wireless communications are mainly used (WiFi, LTE, S-band satellite communication, KA-band satellite communication to support the backhauling,¿). These PSDR network architectures proposed in the literature allow for the support of broadband multimedia services but they lack functionalities for a dynamic resource allocation and for supporting topology modifications as well as the connection re-configurations that could be necessary in case of critical failures and/or critical propagation conditions.
The lack of this flexibility can compromise the operation of the safety network. Moreover the studies developed so far mostly focus on the disaster phase, they do not consider the role of the infrastructures before and after the disaster, with no focus on the integration and configurability issues.
The project aims at demonstrating the applicability of the network softwarization concepts to the PSDR scenario and may bring a significant innovation.
Such innovation is relevant to three different sets of stakeholders in the societal framework:
- network and service operators
- system integrators
- civil protection agencies
Among the stakeholders, the telecom operators may benefit of the results of the project in terms of understanding of the potentials of the new technologies to define their strategic plans and their offers for the specific application environment and more in general for their business at large.
Among the stakeholders, the system integrators providing IT and network infrastructures as well as management services to the private sector may get a deeper insight in the new networking technologies thanks to the results of the project, with an unbiased focus and non-vendor specific orientation. They may exploit this insight in their commercial offer to the stakeholders of emergency and mission critical networks.
Among the stakeholders, the institutions that have the duty to plan emergency networks as part of their emergency and risk management planning will have an example of what the future architectures may provide by observing the project test-bed results. This is an important knowledge base, which will help the planning of future actions and investments.