Transmission of Disaster Warnings via Control Channels in Cellular Networks

According to United Nations reports, natural disasters caused, worldwide, approximately 100,000 deaths and affected 175 million people each year between 2004 and 2013. To reduce those numbers, countries around the globe have made specific arrangements enabling them to warn the population about imminent disasters, in order to evacuate the area in due time. But providing such warnings in areas where no Internet access is available poses a great challenge. In this paper, we proposed a method to transmit early warning messages via UMTS cellular networks, while relying on spare extensions of control channels (FACH). The results obtained are validate based on their comparison with theoretical considerations and are also benchmarked against the 3GPP standard. The results show that messages may be sent faster than with the use of the 3GPP standard. Keywords—control channel, disaster reduction, early warning message, mobile network.