5G Wireless Emergency Alerts Based on Image Code and Cell Clustering

This paper addresses novel wireless emergency alerts based on image code and cell clustering in 5G cellular systems. Most cellular systems offer a cell broadcast technique for emergency alert delivery. The cell broadcast method simultaneously delivers text-based messages to the users in specific cells, which encompass emergency areas. For the simultaneous delivery, the cell broadcast approach relies on a broadcast mechanism, which is called cell broadcast service in the 3GPP standard. However, the cell broadcast service exhibits high latency under poor channel conditions. Moreover, the cell broadcast service may be useless for illiterate persons or foreigners since the service just offers text-based messages. For more rapid and reliable delivery, we propose a novel cell broadcast method for 5G wireless emergency alerts. The new technique enables image-based emergency alerts. For the image-based alerts, the presented approach embeds an image code in the alert message. For the image-code embedment, the method effectively exploits the feature of the message structure. The novel approach also offers a cell clustering technique. 5G mobile terminals can rely on the cell clustering in order to achieve a cell diversity, which considerably enhances latency and reliability performance. The experimental results exhibit that the proposed alert method is superior to the conventional technique in terms of latency and reliability.