Recent natural disasters have revealed that emergency networks presently cannot disseminate the necessary disaster information, making it difficult to deploy and coordinate relief operations. These disasters have reinforced the knowledge that telecommunication networks constitute a critical infrastructure of our society, and the urgency in establishing protection mechanisms against disaster-based disruptions. Hence, it is important to have emergency networks able to maintain sustainable communication in disaster areas. Moreover, the network architecture should be designed so that network connectivity is maintained among nodes outside of the impacted area, while ensuring that services for costumers not in the affected area suffer minimal impact. As a first step towards achieving disaster resilience, the RECODIS project was formed, and its Working Group 1 members conducted a comprehensive literature survey on “strategies for communication networks to protect against large-scale natural disasters,” which is summarized in this article.

Due to the increasing dependence on network services of our society, research has recently been concentrating on enhancing traditional protection strategies to withstand large-scale failures, as in case of disaster events. The recently-formed EU-funded RECODIS project aims at coordinating and fostering research collaboration in Europe on disaster resiliency in communication networks. In particular, the Working Group (WG) 2 of the RECODIS project focuses on developing new network-resiliency strategies to survive weather-based disruptions. As a first step, WG2 members have conducted a comprehensive literature survey on existing studies on this topic. This paper classifies and summarizes the most relevant studies collected by WG2 members in this first phase of the project. While the majority of studies regarding weather-based disruptions deals with wireless network (as wireless channel is directly affected by weather conditions), in this survey we cover also disaster-resiliency approaches designed for wired network if they leverage network reconfiguration based on disaster “alerts”, considering that many weather-based disruptions grant an “alert” thanks to weather forecast.

Path protection is a fast and capacity-efficient approach for increasing the availability of end-to-end connections. However, sometimes it is not possible to obtain a fully disjoint path pair. In this case, it may be admissible to consider a path pair which is as disjoint as possible, and thus provide the best (in a certain sense) level of the single-fault protection that can be ensured using this type of approach. A shared risk link group (SRLG) is a group of links which have a common risk of failure. Two new heuristics for solving the min-sum maximally node and SRLG-disjoint path pair are presented. The relative performance of the new heuristics and also of two other previously proposed heuristics is evaluated using four different networks. Results, regarding accuracy and execution time of the studied heuristics, show that one of the new proposed algorithms can be a good compromise for use in the Generalized Multi-protocol Label Switching control plane.

A shared risk link group (SRLG) is a set of links which share a common risk of failure. Routing protocols in Generalized MultiProtocol Label Switching, using distributed SRLG information, can calculate paths avoiding certain SRLGs. For single SRLG failure an end-to-end SRLG-disjoint path pair can be calculated, but to ensure connection in the event of multiple SRLG failures a set with more than two end-to-end SRLG-disjoint paths should be used. Two heuristic, the Conflicting SRLG-Exclusion Min Sum (CoSE-MS) and the Iterative Modified Suurballes’s Heuristic (IMSH), for calculating node and SRLG-disjoint path pairs, which use the Modified Suurballes’s Heuristic, are reviewed and new versions (CoSE-MScd and IMSHd) are proposed, which may improve the number of obtained optimal solutions. Moreover two new heuristics are proposed: kCoSE-MScd and kIMSHd, to calculate a set of \(k\) node and SRLG-disjoint paths, seeking to minimize its total cost. To the best of our knowledge these heuristics are a first proposal for seeking a set of \(k\, (k>2)\) node and SRLG-disjoint paths of minimal additive cost. The performance of the proposed heuristics is evaluated using a real network structure, where SRLGs were randomly defined. The number of solutions found, the percentage of optimal solutions and the relative error of the sub-optimal solutions are presented. Also the CPU time for solving the problem in a path computation element is reported.

This paper presents views on how quantitative multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches may be applied to certain aspects of user experience design and evaluation (D&E) methods identification, emphasizing its strengths and weaknesses for this task. Often D&E methods need to be applied in contexts different of those they had been applied before and as such must be transferred to those new contexts. This work presents a model for the quantitative method matching step of the transfer process, describes how different MCDM methods can be applied to this task, and discusses the results of an experience that tried to apply a couple of MCDM procedures to method selection.