Supervision and energy management system for smart telecom tower based on the LoRaWAN protocol

Abstract

Currently, with the explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and systems, an increasing number of practical applications can be found in many fields including industry, asset tracking, agriculture, smart metering, smart city and building. IoT sensors based on Low-Power Wide-Area (LPWA) Network technologies appears suitable for the deployment of instruments and sensors on a traditional telecom tower to develop additional services for tower Company allowing a better monitoring of its facilities, energy consumption and various equipment supervision. As many telecom sites are close to cities, they can also contribute to develop services for the future smart city and building needs. However, this feasibility must be performed in a real use of Telecom Tower conditions, such as frequency interference. In this paper, we propose a method to equip a telecom tower considering the Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) protocol in order to gather data from IoT sensors networks that are deployed in the surrounding buildings. We show that the use of the top of telecom tower allows a large private LoRaWAN network covering up to 32 km with only one gateway. Data from different sensors are retrieved directly on local computers and on Cloud applications for further processing. Dashboards are then realized from IoT platforms for monitoring and energy management of telecom towers which can be extended to the buildings smart supervision and control.