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Authors
Abstract(s)
Catastrophic events are often unpredictable, making the reuse of existing infrastructures
crucial to developing alternative communication strategies that minimise their
impact on public communication and the timely dissemination of official alerts. The
advent of smart cities, characterised by dense and geographically distributed IoT networks,
offers significant potential for such reuse. Furthermore, in post-disaster contexts,
uncertainty and panic can endanger public safety and hinder rescue operations,
particularly in a hyperconnected world where communication failures and misinformation
can intensify these risks.
This dissertation presents HaLert, a resilient smart city architecture based on a Wi-
Fi HaLow IEEE 802.11s mesh network, enabling rapid resource reallocation to support
an emergency communication system for exchanging text, location, image, audio, and
video between citizens and authorities. The system also delivers verified, emotionaware
information through Armando, a chatbot integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation
(RAG) with cumulative context tracking. Network monitoring and configuration
are facilitated by Software-Defined Networking (SDN) via a LoRa controlledflooding
mesh network.
A prototype of HaLert architecture was implemented and tested in real urban indoor
and outdoor scenarios. Results show that despite environmental impacts on latency
(15–54.8 ms) and throughput (134–726 Kbps upload, 117–682 Kbps download),
the Wi-Fi HaLow network remained stable, while the LoRa network achieved a 94.96%
average message success rate.
Description
Keywords
Post-disaster communication Smart City IEEE 802.11ah Wi-Fi HaLow IEEE 802.11s LoRa LTFH Mesh SDN LLM Conversational generative AI RAG