Disaster Resilient Networking - A New Vision based on Movable and Deployable Resource Units (MDRUs)

During the “great east Japan earthquake” on March 11, 2011, a lot of ICT resources were completely or partially damaged due to the tremor and the resultant tsunami. As a consequence, the demand for ICT services explosively increased, mainly because the people of the affected areas were trying to communicate with the outside world that led to a phenomenal rise in the network traffic. This gave rise to a serious traffic congestion, and the emergency ICT networks and services could not deal with this issue sufficiently. This article proposes a network architecture, which is resilient even under the devastating disasters by effectively exploiting especially designed “Movable and Deployable Resource Units” (MDRUs). The concept and configuration of the network architecture based upon MDRU and its features are described in the article. Some preliminary simulation results are also reported to evaluate the performance of our adopted MDRU based disaster resilient network.