Low-Power LoRa-Based Disaster Alert System for Remote Areas

Abstract

Natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, landslides, and forest fires often strike with little or no warning, causing severe loss of life and property. The situation becomes worse in remote and rural regions where communication infrastructure is either absent or disrupted during calamities. Conventional systems relying on GSM or satellite communication are expensive, power-intensive, and often unavailable at critical moments. This paper proposes a low-cost, low-power disaster alert system using LoRa (Long Range) wireless communication technology combined with an Arduino-based IoT architecture. The system integrates environmental sensors (temperature, humidity, vibration, gas, and water-level) with a LoRa transceiver to provide real-time disaster detection and communication to a central monitoring station. A GSM module is added as a redundant fallback channel, ensuring alerts reach authorities and communities even if the LoRa gateway becomes unavailable. The proposed system ensures energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and long-range communication (up to 10–15 km line-of-sight), making it highly suitable for deployment in rural and disaster-prone regions. Experimental analysis demonstrates that the system operates reliably with minimal power, supporting long-term battery operation or integration with solar charging. The architecture can be further scaled to form a mesh network, enabling community-level disaster preparedness and early warning systems.