An information centric approach for communications in disaster situations

Disasters result in disruptions to the communication infrastructure, typically forming a multitude of fragmented networks. This makes it difficult to exchange even simple while critical messages with large portions of the affected population, including first-responders and government authorities. In this paper, we focus on a content driven data retrieval model and propose an enhanced information-centric network (ICN) approach to provide communication resilience to such disruption-prone, delay-tolerant networks. The message exchange between communities and mules takes into account the limited available resources and the fact that the interest and the data might traverse completely different paths, unlike the assumption in many of the existing ICN solutions. Moreover, we argue for the separation of the the logical faces from the actual physical interfaces taking into account the fact that the data mules behave as mobile routers and are connected to different nodes at different time periods, unlike the assumptions made in existing ICN solutions. Our preliminary evaluations show that our solution is able to outperform other approaches such as “Epidemic” and “SprayAndWait” with respect to the latency, response probability and overall performance while improving the performance (latency and response probability) for high priority messages.