Abstract
The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies such as Long-Range (LoRa), combined with traditional cellular communications technologies such as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) offers decentralized mini-grid companies the opportunity to have cost-effective monitoring systems for the mini-grid resources. Nevertheless, most of the existing decentralized mini-grid companies still rely on traditional cellular networks to fully monitor electricity consumption information, which is not a feasible solution especially for the resource-constrained mini-grid systems. This paper presents the performance evaluation of the proposed LoRa-GPRS integrated power consumption monitoring system for decentralized mini-grid centers. Each mini-grid center consists of a network of custom designed smart meters equipped with LoRa modules for local data collection, while the GPRS gateway is used to transmit collected data from the local monitoring centre to the cloud server. Performance testing was conducted by using five electrical appliances whose power consumption data form the cloud server was compared to the same data collected by using a reference digital meter. The correlation between the two data sets was used as a key performance metric of the proposed system. The performance results show that the proposed system has a good accuracy hence providing a cost-effective framework for monitoring and managing of power resources in decentralized mini-grid centers.
Highlights
For many decades, conventional centralized grid extension has been a prevalent mode of electrification in several countries [1]
By assessing the accuracy of the power consumption data collected on the cloud server over a specific period of time as the performance metric, it ensures that all other communication variables are taken into account in the final data
Certain performance metrics such as Line of Sight (LoS) and transmission range may not be extensively varied since smart meters are usually fixed at consumer houses, making parameters adjustment less flexible compared to other Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as in weather monitoring
Summary
Conventional centralized grid extension has been a prevalent mode of electrification in several countries [1]. One of the challenges facing the existing decentralized mini-grid systems is the lack of cost-effective infrastructure to monitor and manage electricity consumption from remote mini-grid centers [4]. By integrating with traditional cellular communication technologies such as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), LoRa implementation offers a viable solution for the deployment of a cost-effective cloud-based monitoring system for remote, decentralized mini-grid centers especially in developing countries [15]. The main contributions of this paper are: This study proposes a cost-effective electricity power consumption monitoring system for decentralized minigrid systems by integrating LoRa and GPRS technologies. The combination of LoRa and GPRS technologies is used to monitor power consumption in grid centers This approach minimizes operating costs since LoRa uses unlicensed spectrum and low power to transmit data over large distance.
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