Vehicles as Information Hubs During Disasters: Glueing Wi-Fi to TV White Space to Cellular Networks [NS2projects]

Reliance of society on being connected anytime and anywhere via many kinds of devices utilizing an enormously complicated telecommunications infrastructure exposes its vulnerability during disasters. Resiliency of the communication infrastructure during and after earthquakes, Vehicles as Information Hubs During Disasters: Glueing Wi-Fi to TV White Space to Cellular Networks hurricanes, floods and other natural or man-made disasters has become one of the foremost issues both for governments and private telecommunications carriers. Flow of emergency aid to areas affected by a disaster hinges on timely information coming from those areas. The infrastructure including cellular operations, might get disrupted either locally or in very wide areas due to a myriad of reasons ranging from base station power outages to equipment failures, Vehicles as Information Hubs During Disasters: Glueing Wi-Fi to TV White Space to Cellular Networks from collapsed antennas to operator level call prioritization policies. Moreover, Wi-Fi hotspot and access point connectivity might be lost due to similar causes. This, in turn, instantly renders expensive and multi-functional gadgets such as smart phones, tablets, personal computers and countless other communication devices useless. This hypothetical sounding scenario is exactly what happened during and after the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011 leaving scores of people hopelessly trying Vehicles as Information Hubs During Disasters: Glueing Wi-Fi to TV White Space to Cellular Networks to reach their families, relatives and friends over a nonfunctioning or partially functioning network. The following is a brief description of the system and the flow of events during the demonstration which was presented at the 20th ITS World Congress Tokyo 2013. We showed that during disasters vehicles can convey information from an area where the telecommunications network is disrupted, to an area where the telecommunications infrastructure is intact. The demonstration was a combination Vehicles as Information Hubs During Disasters: Glueing Wi-Fi to TV White Space to Cellular Networks of different technologies including Wi-Fi, TV white space, cellular networks, and the movement of the vehicles themselves. We applied and expanded Internet’s cornerstone concept of store-and-forward packet switching in a different context where the unit of “packet” was replaced with a piece of information belonging to a person, place or thing. TV white space used for V2V Vehicles as Information Hubs During Disasters: Glueing Wi-Fi to TV White Space to Cellular Networks communications in this demonstration was the first trial carried out in any metropolitan area in the world. The demonstration starts with several users in the “disaster affected” area inputting text and voice to a tablet and transmitting it to a nearby vehicle equipped with a Wi-Fi access point. Each user tablet screen was made to have a different background color so that the users would know when and how their messages move hop-by-hop in between vehicles eventually to appear in the cloud.