# Bushfire Disaster Monitoring System Using Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN)
## 1 Introduction  
The need for disaster monitoring and recovery mechanisms has arisen as long as natural disasters and their adverse effects have been known to humankind. The long list of natural and man-made disasters include: floods; heavy snowfalls; wild/bush fires; storms/hurricanes; tsunamis; earthquakes; pandemics, and; nuclear disasters [1; 2]. Despite there being a strong need to implement communications between a disaster-stricken area and the disaster managing offices in local or global agencies such as the United Nations and the European Commission, the goal is to secure the necessary communications to support first responder activities with a strategy to restore network services in the initial aftermath [3]. As the internet is emerging with prevalent technologies such as big data, cloud computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and 5G cellular networks, it is now feasible to provide low-cost networks that cover a wide area such as long-range (LoRa) networks as a type of low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) [4; 5]. These technologies allow sensors to be deployed and managed with a low-power (e.g., 25 mW), wide-area client and up to a 25-km test link for the operating areas for sensor networks [6]. When IoT networks, estimated by Cisco to have 50 billion connected devices by 2020 [7], are deployed and converged with these sensor networks, it may be possible to monitor virtually all habitable areas without requiring additional managing systems. That is, through self-communications amongst devices such as machine-to-machine (M2M) interfaces anddevice-to-device (D2D) communication technologies [8]. For example, a mobile device communicates with a peer-to-peer wireless communications network via D2D communication when the device is out of range of the cellular network. In an emergency situation, it sends a message from the device to a network element if a network connection between the mobile device and network element exists. If this connection does not exist, the device sends the message to a second mobile device, which will connect to the third mobile device via D2D communication [8]. M2M communication technology is used in IoT for various applications, such as an alarm notification to mobile tower monitoring systems [9] and in mobile health (mHealth) alarming applications via the analysis of personal sensor device-sensed health data, as well as utilising intelligent functions such as inference system in body sensor devices [10; 11; 12; 13]. As LPWAN transmits small volumes of data to save battery power, an inference system can also be used to reduce the data size and the frequency of transmission [14]. In disaster monitoring, it is crucial to identify the affected areas and their progression into other areas in order to predict the potential impact and damage. For this, it is required to know the geographical location information of individual sensor nodes, which may relay the information (sensor measurements and location identification; LID) through the network until it has been received by the LPWAN gateway, which will eventually be reached by the disaster relief agency (DRA) through the public network using IP Multimedia System (IMS)- or Voice over IP (VoIP)-based networks, depending on the country or regions. This may present a challenge of carrying data (LID and sensor measurements) to the final destination, as it may cross various networks that support different technologies and have different signalling formats. To solve this problem, we propose to use the calling party address (a number in a setup message to contain LID), which is used by all network technologies, along with the called party address (B number) by replacing the A number field (real calling party address) by a Pseudo A Number (PAN), including LID. There have been tools and risk assessment system recognised by Council of Australian Government (COAG), such as the Bushfire Risk Management Model developed by the Bushfire cooperative research centre.