Viral Networking, Functional Morphing, and Resilient Edge Computing in Emergency Scenarios
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Abstract
As the 21st century progresses, urban infrastructure will come under ever-increasing stress, driven and intensified by societal, cultural, and ecological developments that began in the 20th century and have gained momentum over decades of often willful neglect by authorities.
On the one hand, we have a continuing process of urbanisation across all societies, which concentrates more and more of the world's population in cities and metropolitan areas.
In many cases, these human masses crowd into areas that were never designed to accommodate such a large population.
As a result, in many of the world's largest cities, urban infrastructure operates at, or beyond, capacity, making it highly susceptible to disruptions.
When capacity improvements are attempted, this work is often done haphazardly, leading to infrastructure becoming increasingly brittle.
This leaves our urban infrastructure in a state in which even small shocks can trigger an irrecoverable death spiral leading to system collapse.
On the other hand, the unabated march of climate change is taking us into a future where large-scale climate disasters become not only ever more likely, but unavoidable.
When such an ecological disaster, be it storms, floods, or heatwaves, strikes an urban conglomeration that has already been stretched to its breaking point, catastrophe is almost inevitable.
Therefore, if we are to survive and thrive in this ever bleaker future, we must transform our human environment to make it more resilient to the forces arrayed to destroy it.
Naturally, any such attempt will require a broad, interdisciplinary approach.
This thesis represents a small yet important contribution to this task, the hardening of urban communication infrastructure that enables populations to remain in contact even during disasters.
In particular, three distinct yet interlocking approaches are examined:
Viral Networking enables self-propagating reconfiguration of networking hardware to form resilient ad hoc networks for crisis communication. We present several approaches to apply this concept to varying network architectures and topologies, with work covering all layers of the protocol stack.
Functional Morphing enables autonomous reconfiguration of hardware to acquire and expose new capabilities during times of crisis, which may not be useful/present during everyday operation.
We present both an abstract model for functional morphing to enable the approach to a variety of use cases, as well as several case studies that demonstrate the concept's viability on real-world hardware.
Resilient Edge Computing builds on the previous two technologies to enable resilient in-situ data processing without a global Internet uplink.
We present the REC platform, which enables the distributed dispatch of computing jobs and the resilient preservation of data across the network.
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