Monitoring electricity distribution transformers in Mosul city based on iot LoRaWAN network

This paper offered a framework on the Internet of Things (IoT) to observe and control the largest number of distribution electric transformers in Mosul city. This method has the advantage of providing continuous monitoring of electrical distribution transformers as load current, voltage, winding temperatures, oil level, and oil temperatures to provide timely alerts to correct if there is a malfunction to convert conventional monitoring to smart monitoring. As a result, the life of distribution transformers is extended, lowering the cost of maintenance. This paper suggests a design that utilized LoRa-WAN based on the IoT by using LoRa modules to send this data across a LoRa gateway that communicate to server via Cloud platform on the internet. If any of the distribution transformer’s end devices (EDs) parameters exceeds the predetermined value, the EDs will send alerts to LoRa-Wan. After loRa will receive these alerts, the network then will implement the necessary action. This paper provides an implementation of simulation software (omnet++) program to assess the LoRa performance as implemented through the framework of FLoRa to simulate transformers for electrical distribution. The results of the study demonstrated the ability of modeling and simulating different environments by assigning suitable parameters value of LoRa for the carrier frequency, coding rate, spreading factor, bandwidth, and power transmit. Network performance has been improved through minimize the energy consumption for EDs and increase of the packets delivery ratio by reducing the size of the network’s area, incrementing the number of LoRa gateways, and reducing the distance between the EDs and the gateway.