A new low‐cost and low‐power industrial internet of things infrastructure for effective integration of distributed and isolated systems with smart grids

Abstract

Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) has recently become one of the fast‐growing technologies in the world. Integrating existing systems with smart grids still represents a significant challenge arising from the massive cost of upgrading the infrastructure. This paper provides an IoT infrastructure solution based on a newly designed low‐cost microcontroller‐based IoT remote terminal unit (RTU) to integrate new, old, and conventional sites of existing grids with smart grids. The IoT RTU supports Wi‐Fi communication and includes digital/analog inputs and outputs besides the advantage of serial data transmission standard RS‐485 as an industrial field communication (IFC). The Modbus communication protocol is utilized as a serial industrial protocol that can be interfaced over the RS‐485 standard. The advantage of having an IFC protocol integrated into the IoT infrastructure enables to link any supported device and publish the required data to the cloud, besides the ability to add smart metering technologies, which allows Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) in these areas. IoT‐enabled Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system is integrated with the proposed IoT infrastructure for its advantages of remote monitoring and control. The proposed IoT infrastructure is characterized by proper data security and low power consumption. The IoT infrastructure is simulated with an existing real application for proof of concept, and the results are discussed for different case studies.

Keywords

• Energy management
• Internet of Things
• SCADA systems
• Smart grids