Internet of Things for Earthquake Early Warning Systems: a Performance Comparison between Communication Protocols

Earthquake Early Warning Systems (EEWSs) characterize seismic events in real time and estimate the expected ground motion amplitude in specific areas to send alerts before the destructive waves arrive. Together with the reliability of the results, the rapidity with which an EEWS can detect an earthquake becomes a focal point for developing efficient seismic node networks. Internet of Things (IoT) architectures can be used in EEWSs to expand a seismic network and acquire data even from low-cost seismic nodes. However, the latency and the total alert time introduced by the adopted communication protocols should be carefully evaluated. This study proposes an IoT solution based on the message queue-telemetry transport protocol for the waveform transmission acquired by seismic nodes and presents a performance comparison between it and the most widely used standard in current EEWSs. The comparison was performed in evaluation tests where different seismic networks were simulated using a dataset of real earthquakes. This study analyzes the phases preceding the earthquake detection, showing how the proposed solution detects the same events of traditional EEWSs with a total alert time of approximately 1.6 seconds lower.