Emergency Communication and Use of ICT in Disaster Management

The resilience of communication is of utmost importance at the time of any disaster. Unfortunately, disaster can occur at any time without any prior warning. The recent escalation in the number of natural and/or human-made disasters has ravaged millions of lives and caused billions of dollars in property damage without any discrimination between the developing and the developed countries. Minimizing the effect of such disasters becomes the primary objective. The impact can be mitigated by maintaining a consistent flow of information among locals affected by the disaster. The disaster management organizations are responsible for maintaining situational awareness to assess the damages and needs. Such insights become difficult to source when the communication systems fail, as often seen, in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. The catastrophic collapse of conventional network infrastructure and the failure in establishing real-time emergency communication paradigms restrict disaster salvage (/rescue) efforts, thereby increasing casualty count in a post-disaster scenario. Every region, from any spectrum of development, faces such challenges in the wake of a disaster. These issues beg for the creation of resilient and swiftly deployable communication infrastructure. Furthermore, such an infrastructure should address the data management issues to stave off congestion, optimize bandwidth utilization, and maximize throughput in the network. Here, we survey state of the art in emergency communication technologies for disaster management. Then, we present how these solutions can be applied to create a rapidly deployable network infrastructure for moving toward disaster resilience, further augmented by Information and Communication Technology (ICT). In this scope, we further discuss such infrastructures keeping in mind the deployment conditions like deployment feasibility, infrastructural scalability, and information management capabilities. Consequently, we discuss SurakshIT, a new network infrastructure, which incorporates hybrid communication technologies and protocol stacks to create a resilient framework for emergency communication while providing multiple application interfaces.