Upgrading Wireless Home Routers as Emergency Cloudlet and Secure DTN Communication Bridge

Reliable communications are crucial for the success of emergency response and management. However, today's technologies used by rescuers and civilians mainly rely on either centralized or specialized emergency approaches, which reveal individual issues especially in infrastructure- less emergency situations (e.g., blackout). In this paper, we present a customary home router upgraded as self- sustaining emergency device which can ad hoc network with nearby devices (e.g., other upgraded routers, smartphones) using wireless communication technologies. On top of the ad-hoc networking, an upgraded router provides (1) personal computing capacities for low-latency offloading from mobile devices (aka cloudlet) using isolated lightweight containers; and (2) store-and-forward delay-tolerant data exchanges to serve as secure communication bridge for cooperation between involved or affected people (e.g., rescuers, civilians). We believe that upgrading ubiquitous routers is a very promising concept for a scalable ad-hoc networking and energy-efficient computing infrastructure in urban emergency situations.