Post-disaster data evacuation from isolated data centers through LEO satellite networks

Today's communication networks require special redundancy to overcome severe multiple element failures. These severe failures can isolate entire sub-components of terrestrial networks - e.g., possible aftermath of natural disasters and threats such as a High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse (HEMP). An integrated use of all communication systems available is important to help lessen the impact over distressed areas. This work investigates the use of aerial platforms with well-defined trajectories (such as LEO satellites) to evacuate data from systems within the affected regions. We propose an algorithm capable of generating an evacuation plan for data located in terrestrial isolated systems, such as Data Centers, through the satellite network, towards final destinations in the main network. Our method works whether the satellite network is damaged or not. The evacuation plan is a node-to-node transmission schedule that maximizes the amount of evacuated data. Post-disaster scenarios are used to analyze how our method performs under different impact sizes and satellite network configurations. The results show that the proposed algorithm produces node-to-node transmission schedules that maximize evacuated data while maintaining fairness among disconnected components.