Developing a neighborhood-scale wireless notification prototype

Abstract

We outline an innovative approach to the development of a prototype of a neighborhood notification system (NNS). The NNS application residing on smart phones will use software defined radio and cognitive radio components to interface with radio frequency transceivers. Mesh networking is proposed for emergency notification and disaster response coordination using NNS. Our focus has been on the IEEE 802.15.4 and the very recent IEEE 802.15.5 mesh networking standard for low data rate connectivity among low power nodes (or nodes whose power consumption needs to be low). The innovation stems from bringing together different hardware and software components – some of which, like our Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform, are themselves still evolving and others, like the meshing platform, are very new – to propose an adaptive, reconfigurable, infrastructure-less ad hoc wireless solution to emergency communications in the unlicensed ISM RF band.