UC Irvine

Seismic activities can cause significant damages to infrastructures and human lives. An early earthquake alert system (EWW) could help save our lives and protect properties. Constructing a reliable and affordable earthquake detection and alert system is a challenging job. Seismic activities do not have any specific statistical patterns that we can observe and study over the time but we only have a couple seconds to detect and trigger alert. Traditionally, earthquake can be detected by either one big seismic station or a set of intermediate size seismic observation units, which are often costly and hard to scale. Researchers in the seismic community have presented new EEW system that can detect earthquake with a lower budget by using crowdsources. However, the performance of the system is relied on the internet of its deployment area, which could be interrupted in big earthquakes. In this paper, we are proposing a hybrid decentralized EEW architecture in which the earthquake detection process is taken off the cloud. Seismic activities are observed and analyzed locally by each seismic node to reduce the impact of infrastructure failure during the earthquake. The capacity of seismic node is empowered by a forest-based network and forest-based dissemination scheme. The new network structure allows low quality electric devices to collaborate with each other to accomplish their earthquake detection and early alert mission.