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.