RAPID: Interactive Internet Outages Visualization to Assess Disaster Recovery

University Of Southern California, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Natural disasters such as hurricanes and blizzards cause economic and social disruption in the U.S. and globally. First responders need information about the extent of problems, citizens would like information about cities where friends and relatives live, and government planners and researchers would like to design stronger infrastructure. However, information about the location of problems and speed of recovery can be slow to emerge during a disaster, and often remains imprecise and incomplete days or even weeks afterwards. Internet outage measurements can be a sensor to measure the effects natural disasters. The principal investigator and his team have shown that Internet outages can be observed from a few central sites--their work on Trinocular has been peer reviewed and they have been collecting data twenty four hours a day, seven days a week for more than two years. Serious natural disasters often result in Internet outages, typically because of power or communication loss due to utility pole failure, flooding, or wire breakage; this correlation has been shown by several groups. While the team makes outage data available to researchers today, this data is currently inaccessible to lay-people and even scientists, since they cannot easily browse the data or drill down into regions of interest. This project makes Internet outage data accessible through a new, interactive website, with goals of directly assisting citizens, first responders, and scientists to understand the scope of disasters and their recovery. Second, this website and data is used to compare the team's outage data with two sources of "ground truth" outages from disasters. A primary source of ground truth will be the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC's) NORS (Network Outage Reporting System): these industry-reported outages are the data the U.S. Government uses today to assess the status of the U.S. telecommunications system. This work will build on ongoing collaboration with the FCC, in which the team provides the FCC with its outage data and works with them to compare it with the FCC's proprietary data. The team also expects to compare its data to public reports of utility outages. This work builds a better understanding of the relationship between detectable outages in the Internet and public utility outages. This understanding will result from making current data more accessible to researchers and the public, and through our comparisons of Trinocular to ground truth data sources. In addition, making existing outage data more accessible to other researchers. This work promotes a better and more timely understanding of the consequences of natural disasters and the speed of recovery. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.