Towards massively multipath transmissions for public safety communications

During their day-to-day tasks, public safety operators rely on commercial mobile networks in order to perform data communications and make use of data-based services. In major disasters, however, it is the norm to witness high degrees of network congestion and, often, to experience service outages caused by infrastructural damage. This may strongly hinder the operativity of emergency operators, that expect to rely on resilient communication infrastructures and that demand network availability no matter what. In order for today mobile networks to provide such capabilities, some degree of redundancy should be introduced, either in hardware as infrastructural deployments or in software as data replication mechanisms. This paper focuses on the latter approach. It proposes a network framework to enable collaborative hosts to concurrently forward replicated data over an arbitrary number of channels, in order to compensate for high packet losses or sudden unavailability of routing paths. The data replication and the forwarding behavior are concerted by an SDN controller, that transparently implements a network abstraction to virtually pool hosts network resources. The paper also presents the test bed that has been built and used to extract the emulation results. These demonstrate that the proposal have the potential to strongly improve data communication capabilities in constrained scenarios, in the form of higher data rates and stronger resilience guarantees. Last but not least, it is shown that services availability may be provided in much more cases, even when regular operativity fails.