Design And Development of a Remote Monitoring Agent For Energy Service Companies In The Telecommunication Industry
Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) for telecommunication sites operate by providing reliable power supply at 100% uptime and billing the mobile operators accommodated on their sites for power usage. To achieve this, there is a need for them to accurately meter the power consumed by connected telecommunication equipment.
Method: This work focused on the design and implementation of a remote monitoring agent (RMA) that will pool both power and environmental data from a telecommunication site. The data pool can be presented as real-time data on the RMA’s webpage, it can be downloaded as historical data, and it can be sent to a remote cloud server at regular intervals. The RMA collects both power and environmental data over an RS485 Modbus network and I2C bus respectively. An alternating current (AC) energy meter and a direct current (DC) energy meter were used to harvest the energy data while the environmental data were harvested using a developed Input/Output controller board based on an Atmega328P microcontroller. Raspberry pi was used as the master controller and Node.js was used to build the application running on the master controller.
Result: The result showed how both power and environmental data can be harvested from a telecommunication site and locally presented on the web dashboard for real-time monitoring of the site power system. The data could be saved locally on the RMA and downloaded for future use.
Conclusion: The implementation of this work provided a prototype of the remote monitoring agent (RMA) that can be deployed by Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) in the telecommunication industry to monitor the usage of the power systems on a cell site.
Authors: Sunkanmi Oluwaleye , Francis Idachaba
Corresponding author: Sunkanmi Oluwaleye
Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed.
Grant information: The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work.
Copyright: © 2022 Oluwaleye S and Idachaba F. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
How to cite: Oluwaleye S and Idachaba F. Design And Development of a Remote Monitoring Agent For Energy Service Companies In The Telecommunication Industry [version 1; peer review: 1 approved with reservations]. F1000Research 2022, 11:1106 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.123632.1)