A resilient network that can operate under duress: to support communication between government agencies during crisis situations

The work in this paper is motivated by the weaknesses in communication networks that were observed among government agencies while responding to the emergency situation posed by the attack on the World Trade Center. The paper proposes a self-healing and self-managing architecture for supporting electronic communication between government agencies in crisis situations when the communication infrastructure is partially disabled. The architecture that we propose consists of independent services with standard interfaces and variable addresses. The services discover each other as required in real time by matching the standard interfaces. Disabled services are automatically pruned from the network and new services seamlessly replace the existing services at alternate network nodes. Complex operations can be performed using these services by integrating the services into existing workflows. The architecture allows for redundancy in the system as well as for requisitioning of additional services when the performance degrades due to a higher than normal load, which causes duress in the system. The paper presents the architecture for such a system as well as a model for simulating such a system under various scenarios of duress.