Population Estimation and Scanning System Using LEO Satellites Based on Wireless LAN Signals for Post-Disaster Areas

Many countries around the world repeatedly suffer from natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and hurricanes due to geographical factors, including plate boundaries, tropical cyclone zones, and coastal regions. Representative examples include Hurricane Katrina, which struck the United States in 2005, and the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011. Both were large-scale disasters that occurred in developed countries and caused enormous human and economic losses regardless of disaster type or location. As the occurrence of such catastrophic events remains inevitable, establishing effective preparedness and rapid response systems for large-scale disasters has become an urgent global challenge. One of the critical issues in disaster response is the rapid estimation of the number of affected individuals required for effective rescue operations. During large-scale disasters, terrestrial communication infrastructure is often rendered unusable, which severely hampers the collection of situational information. If the population within a disaster-affected area can be estimated without relying on ground-based communication networks, rescue resources can be more appropriately allocated based on the estimated number of people in need, thereby accelerating rescue operations and potentially reducing casualties. In this study, we propose a population-estimation system that remotely senses radio signals emitted from smartphones in disaster areas using Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Through numerical analysis conducted in MATLAB R2023b, the feasibility of the proposed system is examined. The numerical results demonstrate that, under ideal conditions, the proposed system can estimate the number of smartphones within the observation area with an average error of 2.254 devices. Furthermore, an additional evaluation incorporating a 3D urban model demonstrates that the proposed system can estimate the number of smartphones with an average error of 19.03 devices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to estimate post-disaster population using wireless LAN signals sensed by LEO satellites, offering a novel remote-sensing-based approach for rapid disaster response.