Critical Infrastructure Analysis of Telecom for Natural Disasters

Critical national infrastructures for power, emergency services, finance, and other basic industries rely heavily on information and telecommunications networks (voice, data, Internet) to provide services and conduct business. While these networks tend to be highly reliable, severe, large scale outages do occur, especially at times of unfolding disasters, which can lead to cascading effects on other dependent infrastructures. This paper describes recent natural disasters in the USA, namely hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, and the impacts they have had on power outages and flooding leading to failures on the dependent critical infrastructure. In particular we consider the impact of these disasters on the affected telecommunication networks. We quantify the level of availability of wireline and wireless services during these network failures. We also discuss studies that were performed in preparation for a hurricane impact. The studies have been performed using the network simulation modeling and analysis research tool (N-SMART), which has been developed to support detailed wireline and wireless network simulations under varying network conditions and degrees of failures. We analyze the levels of outages and recovery times for these disaster events as well as possible mitigations to prepare in advance for these and other potential future disasters