Design And Development of a Remote Monitoring Agent For Energy Service Companies In The Telecommunication Industry

Abstract

Background: Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) for telecommunication sites operate by providing reliable power supply at 100% uptime and billing the mobile operators accommodated on their sites for power usage. To achieve this, there is a need for them to accurately meter the power consumed by connected telecommunication equipment. Method: This work focused on the design and implementation of a remote monitoring agent (RMA) that will pool both power and environmental data from a telecommunication site. The data pool can be presented as real-time data on the RMA’s webpage, it can be downloaded as historical data, and it can be sent to a remote cloud server at regular intervals. The RMA collects both power and environmental data over an RS485 Modbus network and I2C bus respectively. An alternating current (AC) energy meter and a direct current (DC) energy meter were used to harvest the energy data while the environmental data were harvested using a developed Input/Output controller board based on an Atmega328P microcontroller. Raspberry pi was used as the master controller and Node.js was used to build the application running on the master controller. Result: The result showed how both power and environmental data can be harvested from a telecommunication site and locally presented on the web dashboard for real-time monitoring of the site power system. The data could be saved locally on the RMA and downloaded for future use. Conclusion: The implementation of this work provided a prototype of the remote monitoring agent (RMA) that can be deployed by Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) in the telecommunication industry to monitor the usage of the power systems on a cell site.