Transmission Tower Tilt Monitoring System Using Low-Power Wide-Area Network Technology

Abstract

Since transmission towers are generally located in areas with complex geological environments, such as mountains and rivers, relying only on conduct regular personnel inspections wastes considerable human and material resources. At present, the existing monitoring system has also the problems of data transmission, parameter accuracy and transmission distance. Based on this premise, a novel transmission tower tilt monistoring system was proposed in this paper. This research adopted the latest Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technology. Among tehm, LoRa (Long Range) is a modulation technology that provides a longer communication distance. NB-IoT (Narrow Band-Internet of Things) technology is an emerging technology in the IoT field that supports the cellular data connection of low-power devices in a wide area network. The proposed system through the data transmission of a LoRa multinode network, the tilt parameters of tower were uploaded to an online real-time monitoring system through NB-IoT. Each subnode included MPU6050 tilt sensors and a wireless communication LoRa module. The main node contained an NB-IoT module. It can upload the tilt information to the cloud platform. After uploading the data, administrators can arrange timely targeted maintenance for transmission towers with faults according to the analysis results. The proposed approach covers a wide range, has high service quality, and supports many connections.