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The Great Eastern Japan Earthquake had inflicted enormous damage on our daily life. Especially, storage servers had got critical damage and this disaster also disrupted Internet connections. Thus, people were unable to access important data, such as resident and medical information, for some time (Tanaka, 2012). Based on the lessons learned from the disaster, highly-available information storage systems are required (Research and Development on Highly-functional and Highly-available Information Storage Technology). The systems aim to avoid long-term interruption of access to the important data by storing data in geographically distributed sites and recovering necessary data from surviving stored-data in the wake of a disaster.
However, in the network under the disaster situations, there are large amounts of data traffic and some links and switches which were down. Therefore, it is difficult to transfer the data effectively under the disaster situation because of the lack of network control ability based on the various situations such as network conditions and disaster status in real world. The cause of this issue is a gap between people and devices in real space (RS), and information systems in digital space (DS). Actually, people in the RS cannot get the useful information from the DS, at anytime and anywhere. And, the information systems in the DS also cannot get feedback from the RS.
To bridge the gap, some researchers have been investigating ``Symbiotic Computing'' (Suganuma, Uchiya, Konno, Kitagata, Hara, Fujita, Kinoshita, Sugawara, & Shiratori, 2006; Suganuma, Sugawara, & Shiratori, 2007; Suganuma, Sugawara, Kinoshita, Hattori, & Shiratori, 2009) that is a new information and communication paradigm to enable information systems in the DS to support human and devices in the RS by understanding human activity. For realization of Symbiotic Computing, a mutual understanding between the RS and the DS is important technology. This mutual understanding encourages understanding between the RS and the DS each other.
Based on the concept of Symbiotic Computing, authors propose a disaster-aware smart routing scheme for realization of the highly-available disaster resistant storage systems. Their proposed scheme recognizes network and disaster status in the RS in real time, and provides appropriate routing tables to network switches in the RS from the DS. Our proposed scheme realizes effective data transmission by encouraging information flow between the RS and the DS.
In this paper, the authors design architecture of the proposed scheme and algorithm of multipath routing scheme based on the Symbiotic Computing. Also, they integrate parallel transmission with multipath dynamic routing scheme and evaluate its effectiveness through complex network environments.