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.