Experimental results of remote energy monitoring system via cellular network in China

There has been much interest recently in improving power saving and cost efficiency by monitoring the operation status of various facilities over networks. Wireless networks, especially cellular networks, are advantageous in terms of their mobility, coverage, and scalability. However, a weak point is their low reliability due to rapid changes in available bandwidth. We fabricated a prototype of a highly reliable remote energy monitoring system using a cellular network with our proposed transmission control scheme. Experiments were performed in China, where cellular networks are expected to be applied for various applications. We evaluated the effectiveness of our proposed scheme using two different types of cellular network. Results showed that the proposed scheme can achieve the probability that the delay of sensor status over 6 sec is under 10^-6 and maintains an 85% throughput compared to a conventional scheme.