Application of the V-HUB Standard using LoRa Beacons, Mobile Cloud, UAVs, and DTN for Disaster-Resilient Communications

The Philippines is a country constantly visited by natural disasters. In post-disaster situations, conventional communication systems and infrastructures are likely to be disrupted, complicating rescue and relief efforts. During disaster-response scenarios, situational awareness becomes crucial for all parties involved, hence the need for disaster-resilient communication and decision-support systems. In this study, the research group developed a communication system to help in providing contextual situational awareness of survivors and a delay-tolerant network for opportunistic communication. This system employs unmanned aerial vehicles to boost the coverage of transmission and reception of this system. Development of this system used LoRa (Long Range) technology, a new communication protocol for low-powered, long range data transmission, and medium agnostic delay tolerant network (DTN) software stack. Integrated with the DTN is a decentralized near-cloud infrastructure that allow pre-positioning and in-situ allocation of digital assets and services. Outside a disaster scenario, the locals, especially those in remote areas, can use the capabilities of this system for their everyday information and communication purposes. Demonstrations were conducted both inside and outside campus to properly evaluate the performance of the system. Indoor and outdoor use-cases were simulated for various operational scenarios such as long-range detection and messaging, and detection under rubble.