Redundant Communications

Looking to disaster-proof your network?

Hurricanes.  Earthquakes.  Wild fires.

Life on earth can be unpredictable.  This creates challenges for industries where reliability is paramount.  To survive a natural disaster, redundant communications will ensure you have visibility over key aspects of your operations and your people, allowing you to restore services or respond to emergencies as rapidly as possible.

Earth movement can offset microwave towers or lead to damage to underground fiber networks while strong winds and heavy rain can disrupt microwave transmission. Furthermore, during natural disasters, often cell networks rapidly become overloaded by the public making calls to loved ones.  Mission critical organizations can’t rely solely on one communication channel to connect their people and assets.

How Ubiik Mimomax supports redundant communications:

1+1 Hot & Warm Standby

Providing minimal loss of data during swap-over, the individual radios in this solution are hot swappable. Multiple configurations to switch over Serial, GPIO, alarm, antenna ports ensure the highest level of resilience possible.

With less than 1 second for radio changeover to occur and fewer than 8 seconds for any networking topology change to be propagated to other devices, this solution is the ideal choice for the most critical links in a network.

Fully redundant Links

At times we have customers who already have a microwave system or fiber in place but they want to boost the resilience of their communications network.  By adding redundant communications (i.e. additional narrowband links) to the network, we can add network resilience in the face of natural emergencies.

With microwave being susceptible to rain-induced fading and fiber at risk of damage from ground movement (earthquakes, landslips, flood erosion), having backup redundant narrowband links could be the lifeline for communities which would otherwise be entirely cut-off in a disaster.

Read this article here about how New Zealand Police’s Tornado radio network provided vital links during the aftermath of a cyclone (Southern Hemisphere hurricane).

Routing Adaptation Protocols

Ubiik Mimomax has also developed a Software Feature Enabler to assist with greater system resilience.  Three protocols work together to deliver superior network robustness:

Open Shortest Path First (OSPF)
Generic Routing Encapsulation (GRE)
Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP)

OSPF – this dynamic routing protocol is able to learn the topology of the network and therefore re-route paths as the topology changes.

GRE – this protocol may be used to logically pipe routing information through intermediate areas to the Backbone OSPF area.

VRRP is used dynamically to assign a virtual IP address so that the active radio becomes the Master and therefore the default gateway. In the event of a communications failure, VRRP elects a new radio to fulfil this role.

Key benefits of deploying redundant communications:

• Minimize outage times and ensure your core operations are maintained when your network is compromised;
• Narrowband radio offers greater immunity to weather-induced signal fading compared to microwave and is resilient to damage during ground movement, unlike fiber and copper wires;
• Maintain transmission even when antennas shift due to wide beamwidth;
• Positively impact your network availability stats;
• Divert data traffic to other parts of your network to avoid areas hardest hit in an emergency.

Get in touch with our team today to find out more about Redundant Communications from Mimomax.

Read about our customer, Orion, and their experience in restoring service following a severe earthquake.

Try our free Path Assessment to find out whether our award-winning Tornado radios could provide your fail-safe communications.