SoCoDiS 2013 - Workshop on Self-Organized Communication in Disaster Scenarios

In disaster scenarios, such as natural disasters or terrorist strikes, it is very important for rescue teams to get an overview of the current situation. To get that overview as quickly as possible and to coordinate the rescue teams during their mission, it is essential that the teams are able to communicate with each other. However, as the disaster area is unknown and the previous communication infrastructure may be broken, the rescue teams ideally have to bring their own communication equipment to set up an independent infrastructure.
Such an infrastructure may be based on small, fast, and autonomously flying Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that are able to fly over affected areas. These devices carry network equipment that creates an ad-hoc communication network infrastructure among all UAVs, dedicated for the rescue teams. Such a basic communication system can be used to coordinate the teams, to search for people that need help by scanning for isolated cell phones, or to offer new kinds of applications that assist the rescue teams during their work. In the second step, this temporary network can be extended by devices that have more capabilities than UAVs, for example cars or trucks that are able to carrying heavy base stations.
Having such a system would be very beneficial for rescue teams that enter large-scale disaster areas. However, as each disaster scenario is different and each deployment poses different challenges, it must be possible to adapt such a communication system to the specific needs of arbitrary disaster scenarios easily.
Requirements of such a system include:
Adaptation to arbitrary disaster scenarios, e. g. by defining missions in a dedicated language,
having a communication scheme among the nodes that copes with mobility,
offering basic services for common tasks, e. g. scanning for infrastructure remains, and
it has to incorporate self-organization algorithms, to follow missions autonomously.
This workshop will cover aspects of such communication architectures dedicated for disaster scenarios in a whole. It brings together researchers working on different layers of communication systems, as working on such an architecture benefits from knowledge regarding a broad set of aspects.
Workshop Topics
The workshop solicits contributions regarding novel and possibly preliminary research results related, but not limited to the following list of topics:
Autonomous operation of UAVs, to assist rescue teams
Hard- and software architectures for UAV systems
Mission planning languages
Autonomous execution of missions
Mobility-aware inter-UAV signaling protocols
Self-organized task allocation among UAVs
Energy management and flight scheduling
Cooperative swarms and formation flights
Communication in disaster scenarios
Robust TCP/IP communications in MANETs
Interworking between ad-hoc networks and the Internet, e.g. via satellite links
QoS support in MANETs for rescue teams
Middlewares
Services
Routing
Delay tolerant networks
Reconnaissance and repair
Detection of infrastructure, data collection
Data management, data fusion and refinement
Security and privacy aspects in disaster relieve networks
Interaction with infrastructures, e.g. WiFi, GSM, UMTS, LTE
Workshop Organization
chairs:
Florian Evers (contact person)
Tobias Simon
co-chair:
Andreas Mitschele-Thiel
common address:
Ilmenau University of Technology
Institute of Computer Engineering
Integrated Communication Systems Group
International Graduate School on Mobile Communications
{florian.evers | tobias.simon | mitsch}-AT-tu-ilmenau.de
Program Committee
Jochen Seitz (TU Ilmenau, Germany)
Jochen Schiller (FU Berlin)
Oliver Waldhorst (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Verena Hafner (HU Berlin, Germany)
Volker Zerbe (FH Erfurt, Germany)
Christian Bettstetter (Universität Klagenfurt, Austria)
Hans Peter Geering (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
Christian Wietfeld (TU Dortmund, Germany)
Submissions
Each submission will be reviewed by three members of the program committee. Papers will be selected according to their originality, quality, and relevance to the workshop topics.
Papers have be submitted in PDF format via EasyChair (see below). Contributions should present novel and possibly preliminary research results (up to 12 pages, 12 pt, a4, single-column IEEE format).
Accepted papers will be published as a technical report of the Ilmenau University of Technology, available online and via ISBN. Authors have to deliver the LaTeX source code of their accepted paper. Thus, submissions have to be created with LaTeX based on the ieeetran class.
Please submit your paper via the EasyChair page for SoCoDiS 2013
Important Dates
submission deadline: Mon, Nov 5, 2012
author notification: Mon, Dec 3, 2012
camera-ready version: Fri, Dec 21, 2012