LOCATE: A LoRa-based mObile emergenCy mAnagement sysTEm

During the occurrence of an emergency, being it the consequence of a natural disaster or of human activities, the pervasiveness of user-owned mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets) turns into a precious help to convey data and services to all the people involved. As a result, several emergency-related mobile applications have been proposed on the market; however, they are often limited by the networking capabilities of the devices, since they are often based on short-range Device-to-Device (D2D) communication technologies (e.g. the Wi-Fi Direct), or on the cellular infrastructure, which might be not available on the emergency scenario. In this paper, we attempt to overcome both such issues, by proposing a novel Emergency Communication System (ECS) which operates over infrastructure-less phonebased networks, and guarantees long-range D2D communication thanks to the LoRa technology. The system, named LOCATE, includes a mobile application, through which users can convey minimal yet vital emergency-related data, and a dissemination protocol, spreading the emergency requests over multi-hop LoRA links. The performance of LOCATE have been evaluated through: (i) an experimental study, assessing the capability of LoRa technology to convey short, emergency messages over long distances, and a (ii) simulation study, demonstrating the effectiveness of the dissemination protocol on large-scale scenarios when compared to state-of-the-art flooding schemes.