An Account Provision and Management Architecture for Messaging Services in Emergency

In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for account provision and management in an emergency such as a massive earthquake. This architecture stably and constantly provides messaging services such as web mail to people (users) who want to confirm each other´s safety in a stricken area. Even if the mobile phone line and fixed line are unavailable in an emergency, the proposed architecture allows users to stably use the services using their device such as a smartphone as usual by providing an emergency account from the server in the evacuation area to all users and binding the emergency account with their own account. Moreover, even if users move to other evacuation areas for seeking their relatives who have become separated from them, this architecture allows users to constantly use services by updating the binding information of the account. We deployed a prototype system based on this architecture to show its effectiveness. Experimental results using this prototype system show that the proposed architecture can provide an emergency account and services to 1,000 users (capacity of the area) simultaneously.