First Experiences with Earthcloud, a Low-Cost, Cloud-Based IoT Seismic Alert System

A Seismic Alert System (SAS) is one of the most important measures that can be taken to prevent and minimize earthquake damage. The role of a SAS is to detect as soon as possible an earthquake in progress and to then immediately alert about the impending earthquake waves all locations in danger. Clearly, to be of any utility, the communication of the alarm has to be transmitted way faster than the propagation speed of the earthquake waves. This paper presents the rationale, setup and first results of a deployed Earthcloud prototype, an experimental SAS designed to be low-cost, low-power, and cloud-based. Earthcloud is devised to alert locations that are not too close yet not too far from the earthquake epicenter, i.e., those that can benefit from an alarm received from a few seconds to tens of seconds earlier. The system has been designed to leverage existing Internet infrastructures in order to perform both computation and communication in the cloud, minimizing costs and maximizing communication speed and deployment ease. Data harvested by Earthcloud has been cross-referenced with data from the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology and, although still in a prototype stage, the first results indicate that the system can correctly detect earthquakes.