Disaster-based disruptions seriously degrading the performance of any communication network (following from natural disasters, technology-related disasters, or malicious attacks) are now gaining importance due to observed increase of their intensity and scale. The problem is of the utmost importance due to lack of appropriate mechanisms deployed in practice in Europe. Each time, unavailability of communication networks services, considered as an important part of critical infrastructure, in the presence of disasters implies evident societal problems for people desperately seeking for information, or trying to communicate with each other.

The Action will fill this gap by offering the respective solutions to provide resilient communications in the presence of disaster-based disruptions of all types for existing communication networks (e.g., IPv4-based, current Internet), as well as emerging architectures of the global communications infrastructure (i.e., the Future Internet).

Geographical diversity characteristics of disaster-based disruptions across Europe requires creation of an international and geographically diverse group of researchers to provide the proper solutions. Therefore, COST Action is viewed as the best way to address this issue.

This output-oriented Action will be driven by researchers from academia and industry in strong cooperation with governmental bodies. The aim is to introduce the set of techniques of resilient communications, as well as recommendations on how to deploy/update topologies of communication networks to make them resistant to disruptions that can be applied in practice by network equipment operators and national/international network providers at the European level.

Funding period: 1. May 2016 -- 30. April 2020

For Iceland, Esa Hyytiä is for this COST action member of the Management Committee and Helmut Neukirchen is substitute member. We work in this context on opportunistic, disruption and delay tolerant networking (DTN).

COST Action Overview at European commission's COST Association

Project web page

Publications

Presentation introducing University of Iceland members and natural hazards in Iceland

Gianluca Rizzo, Helmut Neukirchen.
Geo-based content sharing for disaster relief applications.
The 7th International Workshop on Extending Seamlessly to the Internet of Things (esIoT-2017). Workshop at The 11th International Conference on Innovative Mobile and Internet Services in Ubiquitous Computing (IMIS-2017), July 10th-July 12th 2017, Torino, Italy, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-61542-4_91, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing book series (AISC) volume 612, Springer 2017
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