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Title LoRaMoto: A Communication System to Provide Safety Awareness among Civilians after an Earthquake
Authors Roger Pueyo, Roc Meseguer, Felix Freitag, Leandro Navarro, Sergio Ochoa, Rodrigo Santos
Publication date February 2021
Abstract Civilians in areas hit by earthquakes become in particular
concerned about the safety of family and
friends. However, outages in communications networks following these events
limit their capacity to get information. So, people drive their cars to
check on their loved ones, risking their own lives and hindering the
activities of first response organizations. This article proposes LoRaMoto,
a communications system that allows civilians to exchange information about
their status with others without hampering the first responders and
minimizing their exposure to hazards. Furthermore, the information exchanged
can be aggregated to support the operations of emergency management.
LoRaMoto extends the LoRaWAN architecture and implements a packet-forwarding
mechanism between the end nodes of the system. This helps overcome potential
infrastructure blackouts after an earthquake, so it provides safety
awareness information when it is most needed. We evaluated the system
performance and capacity of this system by simulating its use in a realistic
environment, testing a baseline configuration, and exploring several
modifications to better understand its scalability and its portability to
other emergency environments. The simulation results show how the LoRaMoto
system can meet the communication needs of civilians, and also keep first
response and emergency management organizations informed.
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Pages 150-170
Volume 115
Journal name Future Generation Computer Systems
Publisher Elsevier Science (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
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