Metrics for evaluating the seismic vulnerability of telecommunication networksE

Urban communities have been massively relying on telecommunication infrastructures for everyday activities in the past decade. Their importance is also crucial during emergencies to enable communication among users and first responders. This paper presents a methodology to model and assess the seismic vulnerability of wireless telecommunication networks on the urban scale. The case study is a virtual testbed that is representative of a typical European city. The information to model the infrastructure has been collected from a crowdsourced database and satellite imagery. Since most of the telecommunication network components are located on the roof and inside buildings, the vulnerability of the network has been linked to the damages caused by a given earthquake scenario to the built environment. Different simulations allowed to estimate the failed towers, the available throughput, and the number of users served by each base station after the seismic event. These results have been used to formulate three vulnerability metrics that can be used for detailed resilience analyses.