A Cyber Physical Buses-and-Drones Mobile Edge Infrastructure for Large Scale Disaster Emergency Communications

Immediately after a disaster, the normal telecommunication infrastructure, including wired and wireless networks, is often seriously compromised and cannot guarantee regular coverage and reliable communications services. These temporarily-missing communications capabilities are crucial to rescuers and affected citizens as the responders need to effectively coordinate and communicate to minimize the loss of lives and property. A cyber-physical system (CPS) is composed of integrated communication, computation and physical objects, and cyber-physical vehicle systems (CPVSs) are an emerging field due to the rapid advancements on real-time computing, mobile communications and autonomous control in intelligent transport systems. In this paper, we propose a cyber-physical buses-and-drones mobiLe edge infrastructure (AidLife) for disaster emergency communications, which aims at a rapidly deployable resilient system capable of supporting flexible communications to serve large-scale disaster situations by utilizing the existing public transport system. In particular we envision a proposal where public buses can be recruited to temporarily host portable base station (BS) and computation units as well as power resources so as to form a buses-based mobile edge infrastructure, and also accommodate drones to extend their coverage to hard-to-reach areas. Our preliminary results show that the AidLife system can guarantee a good coverage to users, even when a large number of normal BSs that are damaged.