Name-based replication priorities in disaster cases

Abstract

In the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, network infrastructure is likely to have suffered severe damages that challenge normal communications. In addition to that, traffic substantially increases as a result of people attempting to get in touch with friends, relatives or the rescue teams. To address such requirements of a challenged network, we propose a communication framework based on messages that exploits name-based replication of content and enables ad-hoc communications with spatial and temporal scoping and prioritisation of named messages. We evaluate our design against less sophisticated replication strategies and show that important messages (e.g., from first responders) get disseminated to more nodes than less important messages.