Information Technology: How it can be helpful in the case of Natural Disaster

Vijay Kr. Chaurasiya
Faculty Member
IIIT- Allahabad

When we talk about natural disasters we always talk about how to prevent it, but in my view prevention is not possible. The only possibility we have is to predict when the disaster is going to happen.

In this article, I am proposing one of such technology which can be of help in predicting disaster information beforehand. The solution is to use wireless sensor networks in the sensitive geographical areas.

Wireless sensor networks have received increasing attention in the recent few years. In many military and civil applications of sensor networks, sensors are constrained in onboard energy supply and are left unattended. Energy, size and cost constraints of such sensors limit their communication range. Therefore, they require multi-hop wireless connectivity to forward data on their behalf to a remote command site. Inexpensive sensors are deployed for data collection from the field in a variety of scenarios including military surveillance, building security, in harsh physical environments, for scientific investigations on other planets. A sensor node will have limited computing capability and memory, and it will operate with limited battery power. These sensor nodes can self organize to form a network and can communicate with each other in a wireless manner.

Sensor networks of the future are envisioned to revolutionize the paradigm of collecting and processing information in diverse environments. However, the severe energy constraints and limited computing resources of the sensors, present major challenges for such a vision to become a reality. Collecting data from hundreds of sensor nodes periodically, and making it available to thousands of interested users, is arduous task. Sensor nodes can aggregate the data but memory constraints do not allow the data to be available at all the time for varying nature and requirement of end user.

Sensor network consists of a large number of sensor nodes that combine one or more physical sensing capabilities such as temperature, light, acceleration or seismic sensors with limited networking and communication capabilities. In this scenario users may be interested in different physical quantity and the requirement of user may be different. Some users may want few live readings of sensor data and others all of live readings from sensors, even they may be interested in history of some or few sensor readings for a particular node or all of the nodes present in the network. User requests for data in network with limited bandwidth and, computational capability and multi-hoping nature of sensor network can lead into intolerable delay and network traffic jams. Also generally sensor nodes do not include internet protocol and they use only 2 bytes of address unlike to 48 bytes address as used in infrastructure network for network efficiency reasons. So with deployment of sensor nodes it become equally important to make their reading available to end users for further analysis.

The future of this technology is to find the algorithms to self organize the sensors in a large geographical area and to facilitate routing so that information can be extracted efficiently from the sensors and processed for predictions. Killing many such 'Tsunami's building underneath our planet.