M2M Solution for Cellphone Tower Monitoring

A Cellphone Tower monitoring company came to e-con Systems to build a system to monitor several parameters such as Temperature, Smoke, Power source, door open, Diesel Level etc, in the Cellphone tower and remotely monitor them through cloud. The cloud shall be used to monitor the value across its threshold and raise an alarm if the values are exceeding the threshold limits. When an alarm is raised alerts shall be sent to its associated authorities through text message. It has approached e-con Systems to build an integrated, reliable and robust solution.

Challenge

The challenge in the meeting customer requirements mainly started with electrical & electronic challenges that the system has to face in the environment. The environment is highly noisy with high ESD and EMI signals from its neighbouring generators. So it is a challenge to design an integrated system which need to talk to its sensors kept outside its enclosure and also not affected by Radiated or conducted electromagnetic disturbance. The system also has to face high ESD and EFT injection through its cables. The reliability of the data in cloud is very critical and has to be maintained with utmost precision. Also Temperature has to be monitored to maintain under 25° for the system to be powered on and the power source to be monitored for the optimised usage while running on generator.

Approach

e-con Systems being an expert in system design and giving solution, it proposed an architecture based on its eSOMiMX6 system on module. The system has to be highly reliable because on breakdown of a tower leads to high financial losses to tower company. Being able to understand the use case completely e-con Systems proposed several means of extracting the information about tower and also communicating the same with cloud. After consistent discussion between the customer and e-con Systems, the final architecture was decided and implemented. On Cloud side e-con Systems worked with Amazon cloud based web Services (AWS) to monitor various parameters and give alerts to specific people.

The base board was implemented with eSOMiMX6, i.MX6 based computer on module. The base board would interact with all the sensors to collect information and all the information would be transmitted through a GPRS unit or Ethernet or wireless unit. One of the path shall be selected by the system depending on its availability. The path of information collection is protected for EMI/EMC/ESD events. The power consumption of the product had to be conserved when total tower is running under Diesel Generator. Hence precautions methods were taken to identify the source of power and accordingly switch to power saving modes.

e-con Systems simulated the tower environment in house and ran the system for reliability test continuation for 24/7. This was run for around 2 weeks and addressed all the issues. This made the system completed reliable and robust. e-con Systems worked hand in hand with the customer to get necessary certification approvals for the product.

Conclusion

Customer is now successfully selling the robust product in the market. The tower monitoring business is now highly profitable as breakdowns were brought down to nearly zero.