An emergency GSM satellite portable terminal for disaster management

Abstract

Natural Disaster occurs without prior intimation and often come along with the destruction of the local telecommunication infrastructure causing severe problems for rescue operations. Emergency Telecommunication restoration systems (ETRS) play an ever-increasing and important role in ensuring timely and effective response to emergency. The promptness of action in the rescue phase can save many lives during and after disaster. Satellite communications plays an important role in the ETRS. We have explored GSM over satellite technology as an effective ETRS. An ETRS is effective if the communication restoration is over existing user terminals and hence GSM is chosen. This paper emphasizes on GSM protocol architecture over satellite medium and describes the implementation details of an Emergency GSM Satellite portable terminal. We have analytically evaluated the performance of the proposed GSM satellite portable terminal as an effective ETRS. The results clearly bring out elevated features of the proposed system.