e-con Systems designed & implemented a reliable Machine to Machine (M2M) solution for mobile phone tower monitoring based on eSOMiMX6, an NXP-Freescale iMX6 SOM. Read further to know the challenges faced and how the team executed the system.
M2M Solution for Cellphone Tower Monitoring
Customer Requirement:
- System to monitor several parameters such as, temperature, smoke, power source, door open, diesel level etc. in the cell phone tower and remotely monitor them through cloud.
- The system should monitor and raise alarm when the values exceeded the threshold limit; it should send a text message to the authorities.
Challenges:
- The main challenge in designing the system started with the electrical & electronics and high noise with ESD & EMI signals.
- It was very important to design the system in such a way that it could interact with the sensors and at the same time, should not be affected by radiated or conducted electromagnetic disturbance.
- The system cable faced high ESD & EFT injections & the temperature had to be maintained under 25° to power up the system.
Approach:
- e-con Systems designed an architecture based on eSOMiMX6 system on modules that is highly reliable.
- The system was proposed to extract the information about the tower & communicate the same with cloud.
- Amazon cloud based web services was used on the cloud side to monitor various parameters & to send the alerts.
- Base board implemented with eSOMiMX6 interacted with all sensors, collected the information and same would be transmitted via a GPRS unit or Ethernet or wireless unit.
- Depending on the availability, system selected one path & EMI/EMC/ESD events protected the path of information collection.
- Power saving modes was designed keeping in mind product power consumption & the total power used when running in diesel generator.
- The product was tested in-house with simulated tower environment for 2 weeks (24/7) continuously. All issues were identified and addressed.
- e-con Systems worked with the customers at all levels to get the necessary certification approval.
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