Cellular survivability: mobile PCS systems as scale free networks

The threat of catastrophic events on public utility systems is an ever-present threat. The survivability of wireless systems needs to be considered as they begin to play a greater role in voice communications. Reliably transmitting emergency calls is of particular importance. When a large cellular outage occurs, the network's ability to relay these calls decreases sharply, particularly in the affected area. However, areas peripheral to the outage will also be adversely affected. The work here indicates that the phenomenon of scale-free networks is to blame for this behavior. The catastrophic alerting system (CAS) is proposed as a solution to the scale-free problems behind large outages in cellular networks.