NB-IoT pervasive communications for renewable energy source monitoring

Abstract

Renewable sources like solar and wind energy have seen a drastic increase in the market, especially in developing countries where electricity prices are high and QoS and QoE, both are at their lowest. In this paper, we innovate by proposing a paradigm of smart off-grid from sensing using an Internet of Things (IoT) based smart meter for continuous monitoring, to reporting a daily user on their smart devices using IoT middleware. Our proposed smart off-grid system keeps track of the performance and faults of the off-grid equipment. Under communication technology scrutiny, we model 3GPP Narrow Band IoT (NB-IoT) collision and success probability of grouping smart meter communications to avoid random access channel (RACH) congestion. The proposed smart off-grid communications outperform existing systems and achieve 1.3 to 20 times higher SINR, more than 30 Mbps data rate in 4G, three times higher data rate in NB-IoT, 25% fewer collisions and 25% higher success rate.