A Project for the Synthesis of Composite TCP / IP Networks During Emergencies
Selwyn Russell, Peter Croll · 2006
This paper describes a project being undertaken by National ICT Australia with a Safeguarding Australia theme. History shows that the pattern of use of communications during a large scale emergency to be quite different from those of normal times. The emergency recovery team needs a communication network with capabilities and configurations which have a very different profile from everyday communications networks, to avoid network overload from enquiry bursts and to favour emergency management traffic. Ideally, this temporary network would involve a unification of all commercial networks which at other times are competitive. In transforming the network in a region, crucial decisions are which components of the network to modify and how. With the move towards TCP/IP based networks, the Internet offers a widely used and deployed platform, and the configuration of routing tables becomes the main focus in the quest for rapid modification of network properties to synthesize a composite network. Current router software is not easily modified simultaneously across many routers throughout a region in a way which suits emergency management. This project seeks to provide a user-friendly transmission policy language for rapid definition of the required TCP/IP network behaviour, and the means to convert the policy to a list of target routers and their corresponding reconfigurations for automatic processing. 1