Self-adaptive and resilient urban networking infrastructure for disasters and smart city services

When a disaster strikes a city, conventional information networking infrastructure can be damaged or completely lost, leading to suffering or loss of life. These consequences are avoidable with the introduction of an urban networking fabric for emergency services. We describe here an overall design for a Network for Urban Emergency Services (NUES) that provides essential communication services during disasters and post-disaster recovery. The core of NUES is a dense wireless networking fabric composed of low-cost wireless nodes. Because each node is autonomously powered, and NUES takes advantage of satellite networking services, the overall NUES architecture can be independent of all other (conventional) infrastructure, depending only on users' battery-powered devices (such as cell phones or tablets) and satellite data services. But it also has the ability to exploit conventional infrastructure (in particular cellular wireless) to reduce cost and provide greater bandwidth to users. Since some NUES nodes themselves may be damaged or lost, NUES is also designed for resilience, with redundant nodes connected by a self-healing network. Due to its dense coverage and modular node architecture, NUES also provides smart city sensing services the year around, greatly increasing its cost efficiency.