Internet of Things (IoT) Considerations, Requirements, and Architectures for Disaster Management System

In recent decades, serious natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, and forest fire have occurred with catastrophic consequences. To minimize the loss of lives and damages in the aftermath of a disaster, it is important that rescuers are able to track the trapped victims and perform synchronized relief efforts immediately. The traditional telecommunication systems (e.g. a landline or cellular network) may be either partially or completely damaged by a disaster incident. Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the promising technologies that can be employed to aid in the aftermath of various types of disasters. IoT is the network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate, sense, and interact with their internal or the external environment. The smart devices involved are responsible for connectivity, computing, collection, and convergence with other devices and networks. Recently, IoT paradigm has opened a promising door toward multiple problems related to network operators in the design of upcoming 5G wireless network, where stringent performance requirements in terms of data rate, reliability, and low latency are to be met. The deployment of IoT-based systems also allows the existing technologies to be more efficient, robust, secure, and resilient, and with all these promising features, IoT is a very good candidate to be used in the concept of public safety networks. In this context, device-to-device (D2D) communications represent a key enabling technology, which offers key benefits for future disaster management system (DMS) scenarios. This study proposes edge-based IoT applications which rely on D2D transmissions between the IoT devices in the presence of mobile users. In particular, when the coverage of neighbouring cellular edge nodes is used together with D2D communications, significant improvements can be expected in terms of the energy efficiency of the overall network.