Off-grid emergency communication work featured by Help Net Security

Our work on off-grid civilian emergency communication was featured by the security news outlet Help Net Security, under the headline “New system aims to keep people connected when networks fail.”

When disaster strikes, cell towers and internet links often go down. The system was built by Karim Khamaisi, now a member of our group, during his MSc at the University of Zurich. It combines LoRa long-range radio with a smartphone app over Bluetooth to form a mobile ad hoc network that works without any fixed infrastructure, adding public-key identity verification and role-based moderation to keep the channel trustworthy. In field tests in Zurich, the 868 MHz configuration reached about 1.2 km with a 92% packet delivery rate in an urban setting.

The underlying paper, Bridging Technical Capability and User Accessibility: Off-grid Civilian Emergency Communication, was later named a Best Paper Candidate at the ACM International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2025) in Vienna. Read the preprint or the coverage.