Open information gateway for disaster management

How to exchange information between parties in a mega-scale disaster management system is one of the fundamental challenges to support timely and efficient disaster response and relief. Specifically, the timeliness, scalability, and availability are three desirable features for information exchange. We call the framework to support information exchange with the three features an open information gateway, OIGY in short. In this paper, we present the challenges of information gateway, and the design of the communication protocols and the fundamental components and algorithms to support the aforementioned features. The efforts of this work will be divided into two major components: one is the distributed Truthful Real-time Information Publishing and Subscribing (TRIPS), and the other one is Heterogeneous And Plug-n-PlaY networks (HAPPY). The two components in OIGY collaborate to provide reliable and timely information publish and subscription service. TRIPS is responsible for logical information exchange management. Compared to modern real-time publish and subscription services, TRIPS is aimed at information responsiveness and distributed content-based filtering in an un-reliable network. To achieve better responsiveness, TRIPS will take advantage of the run-time service composition of SOA framework to select information sources. To enhance the success rate, TRIPS relies the information routing information provided by HAPPY. HAPPY will integrate heterogeneous communication networks including 3G/WiMAX telecommunication network and mesh mobile network into a coherent communication network and discovers the routes with probabilistic bandwidth guarantee.