Yamani Dalpathadu, Thumma Showry, Vishnupriya Kuppusamy, Asanga Udugama, Anna Forster

GoodIT '21: Conference on Information Technology for Social Good. (2021)

doi: 10.1145/3462203.3475917

In the wake of a disaster, when all communication infrastructure has been damaged, it is critical to find a way to maintain communications to disseminate critical information collected by the rescuers. Even though many proposals and systems have surfaced, the critical drawback found in these systems is the communication range. Here we propose a solution for communication in post-disaster rescue operations based on LoRa, a long-range, low power technology. Using the concepts of Opportunistic Networks, we employ the epidemic forwarding protocol to disseminate data between the rescuers as well as other external parties. In this work, we present our solution, the implementation in a commercially available LoRa platform, built an experimental setup, identified a set of test cases, and evaluated the performance based on these test cases. Based on the initial results, we show that our proposal is a viable solution to be used by rescuers. We intend to work further on this solution to improve it by identifying optimal configurations for its best performance in realistic post-disaster rescue operations.

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