Demo: Chat based Emergency Service via Long Range Wireless Communication (LoRa)

Internet and mobile communication are the foundation of today’s worldwide interaction and connectivity. Recently, several approaches have been introduced in order to add resilience to communication networks mainly by using low cost and commodity hardware by e.g., facilitating smart phones interconnected via LoRa communication. We extend those ideas by introducing a novel and versatile networking architecture for emergency communication in the context of crisis situations (e.g., when cellular coverage is gone) for mobile devices to keep communication overhead low by following an ad hoc and distributed multi-hop networking approach. In this work, we present a demo of our network to handle emergency communication. It features the long-range, wide area communication technique (LoRa), a web-based chat client with a user-friendly interface, a novel data processing approach, as well as a routing algorithm to ensure fast and efficient communication.