Beyond content delivery: can ICNs help emergency scenarios?

Natural disasters are becoming more and more prominent in our world today, increasing by over 400 percent in the last 20 years alone. To overcome the challenges brought about by such situations, it has been proven vital to ensure continued and effective communication. Unfortunately, however, this has often been difficult with network failures commonplace, particularly during large-scale emergencies, e.g. earthquakes. In this article we explore the potential of information-centric networks (ICNs) to provision highly resilient communications during disaster scenarios. We first provide background to the area, before highlighting the key characteristics of ICNs that are well suited to augmenting resilience in the domain. Following this, we explore remaining challenges of note, concluding that, despite its potential, several key obstacles must be overcome before a truly resilient ICN can be realized.