Smart Online Protection System for Power Transmission Towers: An IoT-Aided Design and Implementation

Abstract

Transmission lines and towers have a crucial role in guaranteeing power system reliability and stability. At present, physical patrol by staff is the major protection method for transmission towers which is practically ineffective and might lead to undesired results due to environmental, climate, and human factors. This has motivated regional power utilities to search for a systematic and intelligent defense strategy against security threats arising from stealthy attacks against lattice towers of high-voltage transmission lines. In this work, we design and implement a smart online protection system (SOPS), based on the concept of Internet-of-Things (IoT), to reduce the security risks from invasion against lattice towers of transmission lines. Status information of towers together with the environmental data are locally acquired and processed by various sensors and micro-controllers installed on the towers and transmitted to a control center via cellular network using HTTP communication protocol. A web-based software program is developed for real-time monitoring and control of local devices/hardware positioned at the transmission towers located miles away from the control center. Various data processing algorithms were implemented for warning signal generation and visualization which improved SOPS performance for detecting actual security threats. The proposed system and design were successfully implemented in Hormozgan’s regional power utility (Iran). Experimental results substantiated that the proposed strategy is valid, effective, and accurate. This strategy also yields opportunities, features, and applications that can be studied and extended as future work.