Hybrid Architectural Network Implementation to Realize a Fire Evacuation Path with 2.4 GHz Zigbee and LoRa

• Published in: Sustainability Vol. 13; no. 23; p. 13238
• Main Authors: Singh, Rajesh, Birajdar, Gajanand S., Rashid, Mamoon, Gehlot, Anita, Akram, Shaik Vaseem, AlGhamdi, Ahmed Saeed, Alshamrani, Sultan S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.12.2021
• Subjects: Architecture; Building automation; Buildings; Controllers; Evacuations & rescues; Field programmable gate arrays; Fire prevention; High rise buildings; Infrastructure; Internet of Things; Literature reviews; Sensors; Signs; Urban areas; Wireless communications; Wireless networks
• ISSN: 2071-1050; 2071-1050
• DOI: 10.3390/su132313238

The Internet of Things (IoT) is playing a significant role in realizing real monitoring. In fire safety and evacuation, early fire event detection using IoT-enabled sensors may help to control and minimize further consequences of the fire accident. In this study, we propose a hybrid architecture based on 2.4 GHz Zigbee and long-range (LoRa) for real-time fire detection, monitoring, and assisting in the safe evacuation of the building. The architecture comprises five different components, namely: end device, evacuation path display controller, safety operation controller, vision node, and gateway. The end device and vision node provide real-time sensory data and visuals that provide details of fire occurrence. The evacuation path display controller and the safety operation controller based on the 2.4 GHz Zigbee receive data from the end device and make the decision accordingly. In addition, a Zigbee simulation is performed on the OPNET simulator to analyze the network parameters such as throughput, retransmission attempts, medium access (MAC) queue size and queue delay, and packet delivery ratio (PDR). The evaluation metrics of link budget and ToA of LoRa are also calculated by varying the code rate and spreading factor. To realize the proposed architecture, customization of hardware is carried out with the development of hardware prototypes. Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm is implemented in the evacuation path display controller to provide the shortest evacuation path during a fire incident. The hardware of the system is implemented in real-time, and the system provides real-time sensor data along with the evacuation path.