Main Content

Resilient Communication in Disasters

Our society increasingly relies on information technology for many everyday tasks ranging from personal communication to critical infrastructure management. Communication network failures that are caused by disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and cyberattacks, can have a significant economic and societal impact. Thus, approaches are required to provide resilient communication by enabling networks to offer and maintain an acceptable level of service in the face of various faults and challenges to normal operation.

Our current work focuses on resilient and secure device-to-device communication, disruption-tolerant networking, smart street lights and mobile citizen apps for resilient communication in a digital city, emergency communication using unmanned ground and aerial vehicles, opportunistic named functions, and efficient emergency communication by deep learning on edge devices. We also argue hat resilient communication systems should be developed using fault-tolerant distributed reactive programming as a paradigm for event-driven, asynchronous, non-blocking processing where the arrival of new information drives the logic rather than the control-driven nature of imperative languages.

Selected Publications

• Jonas Höchst, Lars Baumgartner, Franz Kuntke, Alvar Penning, Artur Sterz, Bernd Freisleben:
  LoRa-based Device-to-Device Smartphone Communication for Crisis Scenarios. ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings, Blacksburg, VA (USA), 996-1011, 2020
• Milan Stute, Florian Kohnhauser, Lars Baumgärtner, Lars Almon, Matthias Hollick, Stefan Katzenbeisser, Bernd Freisleben:
  RESCUE: A Resilient and Secure Device-to-Device Communication Framework for Emergencies. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, doi: 10.1109/TDSC.2020.3036224, 2020
• Alvar Penning, Lars Baumgärtner, Jonas Höchst, Artur Sterz, Mira Mezini, Bernd Freisleben:
  DTN7: An Open-Source Disruption-Tolerant Networking Implementation of Bundle Protocol 7. 18th International Conference on Ad-Hoc Networks and Wireless Networks, Luxembourg, Luxembourg, LNCS 11803, 196-209, Springer, 2019
• Lars Baumgärtner, Jonas Höchst, Patrick Lampe, Ragnar Mogk, Artur Sterz, Pascal Weisenburger, Mira Mezini, Bernd Freisleben:
  Smart Street Lights and Mobile Citizen Apps for Resilient Communication in a Digital City. IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, Seattle, WA, USA, 1-8, IEEE, 2019
• Julian Zobel, Patrick Lieser, Bastian Drescher, Bernd Freisleben, Ralf Steinmetz:
  Optimizing Inter-Cluster Flights of Post-Disaster Communication Support UAVs. 44th IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks, Osnabrueck, Germany, 364-371, IEEE, 2019
• Ragnar Mogk, Lars Baumgärtner, Guido Salvaneschi, Bernd Freisleben, Mira Mezini:
  Fault-tolerant Distributed Reactive Programming. 32nd European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1:1-1:26, 2018
• Pablo Graubner, Patrick Lampe, Jonas Hochst, Lars Baumgärtner, Mira Mezini, Bernd Freisleben:
  Opportunistic Named Functions in Disruption-tolerant Emergency Networks. 15th ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers, Ischia, Italy, 129-137, ACM 2018
• Lars Baumgärtner, Stefan Kohlbrecher, Juliane Euler, Tobias Ritter, Milan Stute, Christian Meurisch, Max Mühlhäuser, Matthias Hollick, Oskar von Stryk, Bernd Freisleben:
  Emergency Communication in Challenged Environments via Unmanned Ground and Aerial Vehicles. IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, San Jose, CA, USA, 1-9, IEEE, 2017
• Patrick Lampe, Lars Baumgärtner, Ralf Steinmetz, Bernd Freisleben:
  SmartFace: Efficient Face Detection on Smartphones for Wireless On-demand Emergency Networks. 24th International Conference on Telecommunications, Limassol, Cyprus, 1-7, IEEE, 2017
• Artur Sterz, Lars Baumgärtner, Ragnar Mogk, Mira Mezini, Bernd Freisleben:
  DTN-RPC: Remote Procedure Calls for Disruption-tolerant Networking. 2017 IFIP Networking Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, 1-9, IEEE, 2017