Leveraging Cellular Intemet-of-Things for Resilient and Robust Disaster Management

Abstract

To improve operational efficiency, disaster management missions increasingly employ smart and interconnected devices. Autonomous robots are used for remote access, drones for impact zone surveys, and wireless sensors for human presence detection. The interconnection between these devices was mainly realized using wireless protocols for local and ad-hoc access to allow quick information exchange with the first responders. For large scale disasters, however, there is a need for a wide area wireless access, resilient to communication outages to provide robust operational efficiency by interconnecting large number of smart devices. To address this need, the article discusses how the recent advancements in Cellular IoT can be leveraged in a large-scale and complex disaster management missions. The CIoT technologies are also considered in the context of minimizing the time to restore normalcy in cooperation with the existing disaster management solutions.