In this talk, I will discuss an architecture called Energy Aware Disaster Recovery Network using WiFi Tethering (E-DARWIN). The underlying idea is to seamlessly integrate mobile devices carried by the people in a disaster area into the emergency response network by exploiting the WiFi tethering capability that is ubiquitously available in nearly all smartphones already. The emergency network is assumed to consist of especially deployed Wi-Fi access points to connect to smartphone clusters and other backend infrastructure. The vision of such a network is to provide an agile, semi-automated mechanism to engage the smartphones and their sensors for collecting and transmitting data from its surroundings for rescue and disaster assistance purposes. We study the issues of application initiation, device discovery, data collection, and minimum delay data routing in such a network. We also analyze a distributed coalition formation game for distributing the data capturing task among wireless device based on data redundancy and device characteristics (capabilities, available energy, and network participation). We evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture using a prototype application implemented on Android platform and large-scale simulations. I will also talk about the future directions of the research including dynamic evolution of the network as dictated by the emergency situation.

About Krishna Kant

Krishna Kant is currently a Professor in the Computer and Information Science department at Temple University in Philadelphia. Earlier he was with the center for Secure Information Systems at George Mason University, Fairfax VA where he also served as a program director in the Computer and Network Division (CNS) at the US National Science Foundation (NSF).  At NSF, he ran the Computer Systems Research (CSR) program and was actively involved in driving the NSF wide SEES (Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability) program.  His current areas of research include robustness in the Internet, cloud computing security, and sustainable computing. He carries 32 years of combined experience in academia, industry, and government. He has published in a wide variety of areas in computer science and has authored a graduate textbook on performance modeling of computer systems.  He received his Ph.D. degree in 1981 from University of Texas at Dallas. He has since held positions at Northwestern University, Pennsylvania State University, Bell Labs, Bellcore, Intel, NSF, GMU, and now Temple University.  He is an IEEE Fellow.

Personal Site

This event will be conducted in English