Providing first responders with real-time status of cellular networks during a disaster
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Hochgraf, Clark; Nygate, Joseph; Bazdresch, Miguel; Indelicato, Mark; Johnson, William P.; Reyes, Romel Espinosa
- Source
- 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security (HST) Technologies for Homeland Security (HST), 2018 IEEE International Symposium on. :1-4 Oct, 2018
- Subject
- Bioengineering
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Engineering Profession
Nuclear Engineering
Quality of service
Drones
Real-time systems
Bandwidth
FCC
Communication networks
Long Term Evolution
cellular networks
resilience
communications
disaster response
- Language
Existing systems for reporting cellular outages do not provide adequate geographical granularity and do not provide a real-time view of the state of the communication network. This work presents a system for real-time measurement of both coverage and quality of service via crowdsourced measurements from consumer and first responder phones. Baseline coverage and quality of service data is collected prior to a major disaster. During a major disaster, real-time data is compared to baseline to identify areas of congestion or outages. Such information can be used by incident commanders to more effectively deploy resources during major disasters. Furthermore, such system state information can be used to support automatic deployment of temporary cellular network base stations, such as on drones.