Creating a Community Infrastructure for Interoperable Emergency Connectivity

Abstract: First responders to disasters need a complete picture of the community's status in order to accurately assess the condition of the inhabitants and organize available resources to save lives, protect the environment and prevent further damage in the community. However, under disaster conditions, normal communication methods will be interrupted, including landline and cell phones, internet connectivity and power. In these circumstances, novel systems must be available to substitute for the lost connectivity, to allow residents to connect to the public safety answering point, and to allow the Emergency Operations Center to collect and aggregate critical information across sectors to ensure that lifesaving operations are conducted expeditiously.

 This research proposes to develop a community infrastructure for interoperable emergency connectivity that can operate in austere conditions, provide its own power, and create linkages throughout the community and across jurisdictional boundaries. This project will deploy the edge devices in local communities with multi-modal communication modules as well as an external long range radio. The proposed resilient and participatory networking framework on top of the remote edge devices will enable collaborative communication as well as participatory sensing. To solve current deficiencies in the ability of allowing city emergency responders to control and automate the remote edge devices, this project extends existing cloud orchestration frameworks to edge devices that are agnostic to the network media. For this demonstration project, the central cloud deployed in the City of San Jose’s Emergency Operations Center will control the remote edge devices, and be responsible for resilient quality testing, automatic validation, disaster assessment, resource allocation, and the automation of remote edge devices.

Explanation of Demonstration: The demo will present our own developed community infrastructure for interoperable emergency connectivity that can operate in austere conditions, provide its own power, and create linkages throughout the community. We have our own designed hardware and software that will enable edge deployment in local communities with multi-modal communication modules as well as an external long range radio.