MUMBAI, India, July 30 -- Intellectual Property India has published a patent application (202641087463 A) filed by Chennai Institute Of Technology on July 17, 2026, for Byzantine Fault-Tolerant System With Multimodal Precipitation Hazard Early-Warning Sensor Network, Tinyml And Lora Mesh.
Inventors include Dr. Pavithra S; Dr. Kayalvizhi M; Mr. Tamiziniyan Gajendran; Ismail Ridwan S; Danish A. G; Hritik M. B; Preethi S; and Sanjay N.
The application for the patent was published on July 24, 2026, under issue no. 30/2026.
Abstract: In accordance with the present invention, there is provided a Byzantine fault-tolerant distributed precipitation hazard detection and early warning system comprising a plurality of geographically distributed autonomous sensor nodes, a gateway unit in wireless communication with the sensor nodes and one or more alert dissemination interfaces coupled to the gateway unit. Each sensor node integrates an acoustic sensing module, an optical sensing module, a rainfall accumulation module, an embedded processing unit, a wireless communication module and a power management subsystem. The acoustic sensing module includes a piezoelectric Acoustic Drop Size Distribution (A-DSD) sensor having a piezoelectric transducer coupled to an impact plate, a high-pass filter and a signal conditioning circuit configured to classify raindrop impacts into drop-size categories and generate precipitation intensity metrics. The optical sensing module comprises a modulated laser transmitter, a photodiode receiver and a lock-in detection circuit configured to extract optical attenuation characteristics including occlusion duration, attenuation magnitude and waveform morphology. The rainfall accumulation module employs a contactless Hall-effect tipping bucket mechanism to measure cumulative rainfall without mechanical switch degradation. Signals generated by the acoustic, optical and rainfall sensing modules are supplied to the embedded microcontroller, which executes a multi-modal event fusion algorithm by validating temporal coincidence between acoustic impact and optical occlusion events, followed by execution of a quantised TinyML classifier to determine precipitation class and associated confidence values. The processed telemetry, sensor health information and cryptographically authenticated event packets are transmitted through a LoRa communication module to the gateway. The gateway executes a Byzantine Fault-Tolerant consensus algorithm to correlate reports received from multiple sensor nodes and generates watch or warning alerts only upon achieving a predefined consensus threshold, thereby tolerating faulty or malicious nodes while minimizing false alarms. Following consensus, the gateway generates CAP-compliant alert messages and simultaneously disseminates warnings through SMS services, local sirens, web dashboards and MQTT-enabled emergency management platforms, thereby providing reliable and real- time precipitation hazard monitoring and early warning.
Disclaimer: Curated by HT Syndication.
