What Can 5G Do for Public Safety? Structural Health Monitoring and Earthquake Early Warning Scenarios

The 5th generation of mobile networks has come to the market bringing the promise of disruptive performances as low latency, availability and reliability, imposing the development of the so-called “killer applications”. This contribution presents a 5G use case in the context of Structural Health Monitoring which guarantees an unprecedented level of reliability when exploited for public safety purposes as Earthquake Early Warning. The interest on this topic is at first justified through a deep market analysis, and subsequently declined in terms of public safety benefits. A specific sensor board, guaranteeing real-time processing and 5G connectivity, is presented as the foundation on which the architecture of the network is designed and developed. Advantages of 5G-enabled urban safety are then discussed and proven in the experimentation results, showing that the proposed architecture guarantees lower latency delays and overcome the impairments of cloud solutions especially in terms of delays variability.