SDN-ERS: A Timely Software Defined Networking Framework for Emergency Response Systems

Emergency data must be delivered in a timely fashion to assist rescue effort and recovery after a crisis. The data are often classified based on urgency for delivery priority. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of adopting Software Defined Networking (SDN) to support emergency response where the SDN framework is proposed to minimize the end-to-end delay for emergency data delivery depending on data urgency. We further leverage real-world emergency data to evaluate the proposed SDN framework on the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) testbed. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework is effective and efficient in delivering emergency data according to data priority. Specifically, our SDN framework improves the end-to-end-delay for the delivery of different priority emergency services, ranging from 10% to 25%. The proposed framework is also applicable to other cyber-physical systems.