Emergency Communication Services Based on Overlay Networking Technologies

In this paper, we propose OverLay-based Emergency Communication Services (OLECS), an architecture for emergency communication services, that is based on overlay routing technologies. We modify and extend existing overlay routing mechanisms in terms of decreasing communication overhead, searching multi-hop overlay paths with more than three hops, making it suitable for emergency communication services. The location of overlay nodes is also considered for recovering from partial failure of ISP networks. By performing a numerical evaluation using the actual AS-level network topology of the current Internet, we show that our approach can reduce the overhead in exchanging routing information by a factor of up to 1000, and improve network connectivity by up to 9 times.