Challenges of emergency communication network for disaster response

When stricken by a catastrophic natural disaster, the efficiency of disaster response operation is very critical to life saving. However, communication systems, including cellular networks, were usually crashed due to various causes making the coordination among a large number of disorganized disaster response workers extremely difficult. Survival rate can be greatly increased by breaking the communication bottleneck. Based on our firsthand experience in 921 Chi-Chi Earthquake and extensive research, we synthesize a set of requirements for deploying an emergency communication network for disaster response (ECN-DR), which can be deployed and operated under extreme environment and unusually communication behaviors in disaster areas. There are seven challenges, called 7-ability, that have to be addressed when designing an ECN-DR. 7-ability includes popularity, usability, practicability, capacity, reliability, operability and adaptability. Popularity and usability are used to fulfill end-user requirements. Practicability, capacity, reliability, operability and adaptability are used to fulfill operator requirements. Finally, we propose high level system architecture of ECN-DR. Several research issues about how 7-ability can be achieved will be presented.