The Impact of LoRa Parameters on UAV-to-X Communications in Emergency Response Scenarios

In recent years, emergency response systems have been employed extensively in critical operations, particularly for disaster management scenarios. During these operations, robust and efficient communication is crucial to ensure that first responders can obtain critical information for coordination and adaptation to the dynamic conditions of an emergency. The employment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in conjunction with Internet of Things (IoT) devices can provide support and enable the transmission and reception of relevant information in emergency situations. A number of different communication methods have been explored to address communication performance and robustness issues that arise during emergencies. This work tackles these issues by developing and evaluating the performance of an integrated LoRa (long-range communication)-based system for UAV-to-X communications. For evaluation purposes, a LoRa-based prototype system is designed and implemented to achieve robust, real-time, and efficient communication for both static and mobile nodes in indoor and outdoor environments. The prototype of the proposed communication architecture is subsequently tested in a real-world environment, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solution in terms of communication range, transmission latency and security for the applications investigated.