Small sensors,
big applications
TCCA’s SCADA, Smartgrid and Telemetry Group recently produced a white paper
on the topic of ‘Emerging IoT Bearers for non-Mission Critical SCADA’. Here, Critical
Communications Today summarises its main points with additional commentary from
Nick Smye, the Group’s chair and principal consultant with Mason Advisory
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a broad term, but
at its heart it concerns the use of a large number
of sensors and smart ‘things’ connected via a
low-power wide-area (LPWA) communications
technology to the internet, with the resulting
data stored on the cloud. This is then processed using big data
analytics to generate useful insights.
IoT technologies’ key attributes are:
• A very low unit cost to make the business case viable
(this in turn requires a simple radio interface/protocol to
simplify the chipset)
• Devices only need low data rates and can tolerate
increased latency
• Support for very high cell density of devices
• Battery operation with typically a 10-year battery life
• Needs to work ‘out of the box’ as it is impractical to
individually provision large numbers of devices
• Improved coverage (eg, 20dB better than that achieved by
wideband 3GPP bearers).
IoT is of great interest to the utilities sector, given these
characteristics allow companies to monitor equipment in
circumstances that wouldn’t justify the cost of building
traditional outstations (and associated transmission) and
therefore enable a range of applications, such as:
• Electricity fault passage indicators to aid fault detection and
restoration of electricity supply
• Monitoring of 400v/low voltage link boxes – this is an
infrequent but dramatic issue as there have been a small
number of incidents involving explosions under pavements
• Smart manhole covers to detect: opening, entry and
obstruction; flooding, smoke, fire and gas; movement/theft
• Wooden pole inertial monitoring to detect deterioration of
poles’ structural integrity well before they fail
• Metering for revenue, network and demand management
• Smart solar-powered bins that alert when need emptying
• Smart street lighting, which can also host weather and
pollution monitoring sensors, along with systems that
perform car and people counting and can detect gunshots.
Nick Smye says an interesting example of the above is a
trial that Scottish and Southern Energy Networks (SSEN) has
performed on the Isle of Skye, which “has very rugged terrain,
which is subject to the full force of the Atlantic. The Island
has one main transmission line, which runs across it. If that
fails, a lot of people lose their supply and it could take a long
time to find the break and repair it. As it is a remote location,
there is little cellular coverage, so SSEN was looking for some
way of measuring condition of the line.”
SSEN therefore worked to develop a remote monitoring
system with EkkoSense and this was installed on the 809
poles that carry the line and cover an area of more than 1,000
sq km on the Isle.
“The line is made up of wooden poles that can rot,” adds
Smye. “Traditionally you’d do a line inspection every few
years, physically check every pole and assess its physical
strength. SSEN carried out a LoRa trial with an accelerometer
sensor on each pole. This allowed them to measure the
deflection of the pole, so when a storm comes in, if there’s
some structural weakness, you may see one pole bending a lot
more than the others. The sensors are so sensitive that they
can detect a sheep rubbing against the pole. That’s a really
interesting approach. I heard about it six to nine months ago
and SSEN was getting a huge amount of data from it.”
IoT sensors can
be used to help
utilities monitor
the condition of
wooden poles
32 www.criticalcomms.com October 2019
/www.criticalcomms.com