On the Impact of Physical-Cyber world Interactions during Unexpected Events

Physical world events have a strong and direct impact on the
communication activity seen in the cyber world. In this paper, we
present three physical world events where we conducted passive
network traffic measurements to study the interaction between
physical and cyber worlds. We consider the following types of
events: an active shooter drill, a science festival scenario, and an
emergency response drill involving a simulated dirty bomb attack.
The network behavior during these events is contrasted with the
regular network behavior. In some events, we observed substantial
drop in network traffic whereas in some others, we noticed high
traffic surge. Therefore, the deviation observed in the cyber world
activity may be exploited to automate the detection of physical
world events. The drills also involved setting up of wireless mesh
network infrastructure to assist first responders in their rescue
operations and provide Internet connectivity to attendees of
science festival. Our passive network measurements provided
valuable insights which would help us in configuring wireless
mesh network testbeds more efficiently and thereby providing
efficient coordination of the response activity and saving human
lives and properties.