February 6th Kahramanmaraş Earthquakes (2023 Turkey–Syria Earthquake) showed that it is very difficult to contact and locate the victims trapped under the rubble on time. Even if a victim can access a cell phone nearby, the connection between the cell phone and base stations may not be achieved because of the significant penetration loss (i.e., 30-60 dB depending on the carrier frequency) due to the debris, and damaged, inaccessible, and/or congested cellular networks. Methods exploiting heat, sound, or CO2 levels or radar techniques targeting the motions of the body, such as heartbeats or respiration under the piles, are shown to be effective in locating the victims. However, these systems operate at the surface of the rubble and can be limited due to the weakened signals. In this project, instead of an external sensing system, we propose to deploy LoRa devices with sensing capabilities to the buildings and establish a self-organizing mesh network along with the reference nodes deployed by the rescue teams if the building collapses to locate and communicate with the victims.
This repository includes the source code developed at Istanbul Medipol University when I visited the CoSiNC group in Istanbul in 2023. This project is supported by the TUBITAK BIDEB 2221 - Call for Earthquake Research Opens within the Scope of Supporting Scientist with Guest or Academic Leave Program, 2023.
If you are interested in funding or working toward this research, please feel free to reach me.
Our first paper on this concept has been accepted for presentation at IEEE ICC!
A. Sahin and H. Arslan "A Self-Healing Mesh Network without Global-Time Synchronization," IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Jun. 2024
