Energy Efficient Mechanism over LoRa for Search and Rescue operations

Search and Rescue (SAR) operations can be vastly benefited by the use of IoT and especially by Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) technologies, such as Long Range (LoRa). In this framework, the wearable device-based Search And Rescue system (WeSAR) project has been created. The main goals that WeSAR tries to improve are the localization accuracy and the energy efficiency of the wearable device. In this paper, the authors propose an energy-efficient mechanism for LoRa networks, taking into consideration the energy of a real wearable device, containing multiple sensors in a SAR scenario. In this work, we simulate the LoRa network, taking into consideration the various states of a wearable device and the impact of the sensors on the energy consumption, in order to have insights into the mechanism’s efficiency with multiple nodes, up to 500 nodes. The experiment results reveal significant reductions in the energy consumption of the wearable device and improvement of battery life, in urban and suburban conditions, and in stationary and no stationary node mobility models.