Disaster Resilience in Communication Networks

Summary

Communication networks are the backbone of modern society, and their resilience to natural and human-made disasters is of critical importance. Disaster resilience in communication networks encompasses the ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to and rapidly recover from disruptions. This involves redundant architectures, diverse physical routes, robust protocols and dynamic control mechanisms. Contemporary strategies combine advanced modelling of hazard impacts, such as seismic and meteorological events, with network-centric approaches including shared-risk link group analysis and optimisation algorithms for route planning. Practice spans optical fibre, wireless and hybrid infrastructures across urban and rural domains. Enhanced planning integrates fragility assessments of physical components, probabilistic hazard analyses and multi-objective optimisation to maintain connectivity and service levels under extreme conditions. Global research efforts now focus on intelligent automation, energy-efficient designs and real-time adaptation to ensure uninterrupted communications during and after crises.

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Disaster Resilience in Communication Networks publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in disaster resilience in communication networks across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis: A statistical method to estimate the probability of ground-motion intensities at different locations, informing network element failure rates.

Fragility Curve: A function relating the probability that a physical component fails to the intensity of an external hazard, such as ground acceleration.

Shared Risk Link Group (SRLG): A set of network links that share a common physical or geographical risk factor, whose simultaneous failure can isolate services.

Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM): An optical transmission technique that increases capacity by carrying multiple wavelengths over the same fibre strand.

References

  1. Communication Network Reliability Under Geographically Correlated Failures Using Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis. IEEE Access (2023).
  2. eFRADIR: An Enhanced FRAmework for DIsaster Resilience. IEEE Access (2021).
  3. Earthquake-Tolerant Energy-Aware Algorithm for WDM Backbone Network. Applied Sciences (2024).

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