The use of BGAN to implement a robust tsunami early warning system

Abstract

A tsunami is a series of waves created when a body of water, such as an ocean, is rapidly displaced probably by an oceanic earthquake. The effects of a tsunami for the population can be devastating due to the immense volumes of water and energy involved.The EU-funded Distant Early Warning System (DEWS) project is currently implementing a reference model for a national and regional warning dissemination system of possible hazards or disasters, especially in the prevention of tsunamis. In DEWS several universities and companies are participating specially coming from Europe and from the three countries of interest Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand.The Department of Communications and Networking of the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) is a consortium member of the DEWS project working on the development of the communications architecture between the different Emergency Centres, first responders and general public.In this thesis report we present the implementation of a backup satellite communications system between DEWS centres and governmental authorities in order to enable the warning dissemination in case the terrestrial communication structures are disrupted due to the hazard effects.The backup communications structure would employ the BGAN Inmarsat service for the date transmission. BGAN ensures the coverage in almost global earth area and support mobility on its terminals, offering adequate characteristics for an emergency communications system. To that end, we design and describe this communications architecture and discuss its performance in the possible scenarios based on simulations.