A LoRa-Based Communication System for Coordinated Response in an Earthquake Aftermath

Abstract

The response conducted by emergency units after natural disasters, such as earthquakes, has to be coordinated, fast, and efficient in order to rescue and care for the victims, keeping all the population-and the units themselves-safe amidst the usual chaos. Outages in wireless networks, as well as fiber-or copper-based landline and Internet connections, are to be expected in these situations, so alternative communication solutions must be considered. To contribute in this duty, we propose a communication system that uses the LoRaWAN architecture to allow citizens to report their status to emergency units and public authorities with simple messages and interaction mechanisms. The purpose of this system is to keep people and first responders connected, and thus improve the capability to coordinate the evacuation activities. To analyze the system performance and capabilities, we model a district of Coquimbo, a harbor town in Chile that houses approximately 28,000 people in 7500 homes, and simulate it with a baseline configuration. We explore several settings for the system in order to determine its characteristics and limitations, to better understand its scalability and portability to other environments, and to outline the remaining challenges to make the system attain specific performance guarantees.

LoRaMoto: A communication system to provide safety awareness among civilians after an earthquake

“…The initial LoRaMoto design was based on the LoRaWAN architecture [11,43], but it evolved beyond it by leveraging communication between home devices and multi-hop packet transmission. The previous sections discussed the motivations and restrictions that made us opt for the LoRa technology and the LoRaWAN architecture on which to build our proposal.…”

“…Interestingly enough, the widest combination, ranging from SF7 to SF12, which corresponds to the default values predefined in Section 5.1 and used throughout this section, does not provide the best results. Indeed, for both higher and lower densities of gateways, choosing high SFs (11,12) penalizes the performance figures, while avoiding them and concentrating more nodes on shorter SFs increases the success ratio of packet delivery. Nonetheless, it must be noted that the uniform SF distribution is not fair.…”

“…This proposal builds upon the authors' previous work in [11]. In particular, this extended version includes a congestion control protocol, based on Acknowledgment (ACK) messages, that includes a feedback mechanism to enhance end-users' interaction.…”

Heterogeneous wireless IoT architecture for natural disaster monitorization

“…Moreover, the newest IoT networks appear as a new architecture to coordinate natural disasters. In the works [17,18], the authors propose a new system based on an IoT-dedicated network architecture. All these works will help first responder performances in front of disaster management, but the network required is vulnerable versus a natural disaster as it can be destroyed.…”

Implementing cryptography in LoRa based communication devices for unmanned ground vehicle applications

“…LoRa employs a spread spectrum modulation technique derived from Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) technology [10,11]. This modulation technique is resistant to multipath fading and is ideal for noisy environments like disaster sites, with the goal of providing low throughput communication links with ranges of more than 30 miles by consuming low power [12][13][14]. The CSS modulation technique was developed in 1940's for military radar applications.…”