Computing and Communications in the Extreme: Research for Crisis Management and Other Applications

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approaches to such a problem: add capacity and/or shed load. Adding capacity is desirable but may be difficult; therefore, a mechanism for load shedding is desirable. Some notion of priority is typically a prerequisite for load shedding."

Networks can be adaptive not only to sharp discontinuities such as crises, but also to rapid, continuous evolution over a longer time scale, one appropriate to the pattern of growth of new services and industries in electronic commerce or digital libraries. The Internet's ability to adapt to and integrate new technologies, such as frame relay, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), and new wireless data services, among many others, is one example.

Self-Organization

Self-organizing networks facilitate adaptation when the physical configuration or the requirements for network resources have changed. Daniel Duchamp cast the problem in terms of an alternative to static operation:

Most industry efforts are targeted to the commercial market and so are focused on providing a communications infrastructure whose underlying organization is static (e.g., certain sites are routers and certain sites are hosts, always). Statically organized systems ease the tasks of providing security and handling accounting/billing. Most communication systems are also pre-optimized to accommodate certain traffic patterns; the patterns are in large part predictable as a function of intra- and inter-business organization. It may be difficult or impossible to establish and maintain a static routing and/or connection establishment structure, because (1) hosts may move relative to each other, and (2) hosts, communication links, or the propagation environment may be inherently unstable. Therefore, a dynamically "self-organizing" routing and/or connection establishment structure is desirable.

Crisis management provides a compelling case for the need of networks to be self-organizing in order to create rapidly an infrastructure that supports communication and information sharing among workers and managers operating in the field. Police, fire, citizen's band, and amateur radio communications are commonly available in crises and could be used to set up a broadcast network, but they provide little support to manage peer-to-peer communications and make efficient use of the available spectrum. Portable, bandwidth-efficient peer-to-peer network technologies would allow information systems to be set up to support communications for relief workers. The issues of hardware development, peer-to-peer networking, and multimedia support are not limited to crisis management; they may be equally important to such fields as medicine and manufacturing (e.g., in networking of people, computers, and machine tools within a factory). Thus, research and development on self-organizing networks may be useful in the latter fields as well.

Rajeev Jain, of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggested two main deficiencies in terms of communications or networking technologies in a

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