LoRa Mesh Network for Overhead Transmission Line Monitoring

In the last years, low power wide area networks (LP-WANs) have been developed to efficiently collect small amounts of data. Current LPWANs use a star topology, where all the traffic is sent to a central gateway. This makes them easy to implement and very energy efficient, but the coverage area of each gateway is limited and might not be sufficient for all applications. Especially for far-stretching infrastructure projects like transmission lines or pipelines, this architecture is very inefficient. The task of monitoring asset status and optimizing asset utilization for a power grid stretched over hundreds of thousands of kilometers seems costly, if not impossible. For these applications, low-power wireless mesh networks (LPWMNs) are a topic in current research. This paper develops, implements, and evaluates a novel approach for monitoring static structures with a wireless mesh network based on the LoRa (long-range) modulation from Semtech, which overcomes the limitations of traditional LPWANs. The performance of the proposed protocol was analyzed first by simulation and then with a demonstrator network on the university campus. The findings indicate that the proposed network achieves a sufficiently high packet delivery ratio (PDR) to enable the monitoring of large structures.