Feasiblity Studies on Smart Pole Connectivity Based on LPWA IoT Communication Platform for Industrial Applications

In a metropolitan city, the power consumption of buildings is a great concern for not only economic but also environmental concerns. Researchers is proposing some new low power wide area (LPWA) IoT communication protocols to monitor and control power consumption in buildings. Three common LPWA communication protocols include: NB-IoT, LoRa and Sigfox, which can provide different functions or performance under different conditions. For building management system, these protocols can create platform to monitor and control the "things", such as energy. Light Poles are used to be built to continuously lighten up the city which are served as passive devices to be controlled by the Highway Department. With the LWPA communication protocols and sensors or actuators, they can provide a low power low cost network nodes to serve local community; and uplink the data to Cloud via mobile communication network or Ethernet, as Smart Poles. In this paper, some fundamental scheme and based on LPWA protocols to design building management system are introduced; and prototype of Smart Poles have been networked and applied in a traditional industrial area.