Public Safety Campus Networks: Towards a Reference Architecture for Post-Disaster Edge-Computing and Crisis-Communication

The impact of disasters on communication infrastructure can have dramatic consequences for citizens. To ensure their safety, it is important to keep as many citizens as possible in disaster areas connected to emergency-communication and public safety services especially when home-based communication and mobile-network infrastructure failed. This work presents a proposal towards a reference-architecture for edge-computing with Public Safety Campus Networks (PSCN) deployed in disaster-stricken areas. Mobile phones within coverage of these networks may automatically attach with the network and thus provide citizens with post-disaster communication over cellular network. Based on a standards-driven approach, our proposal integrates the 5G Core, Multi-Access Edge-Computing (MEC) and edge-hosted public safety services for bi-directional post-disaster communication into a unified reference-architecture. This work further presents a study on the transformation of a public warning/alerting system, currently deployed in Germany, transforming its architecture from a centralized towards an edge-enabled architecture, making it deployable in Public Safety Campus Networks.