Designing a reliable and low-latency LoRaWAN solution for environmental monitoring in factories at major accident risk

TL;DR

This paper presents a reliable, low-latency LoRaWAN-based system for real-time environmental monitoring in factories at major accident risk, focusing on toxic gas detection and urgent data delivery.

Contribution

It introduces a fully LoRaWAN compliant solution with coordinated device transmissions to enhance reliability and reduce latency in industrial environmental monitoring.

Findings

Validated the proposed method through experiments

Achieved low latency and high reliability in gas detection

Demonstrated suitability for factory accident prevention scenarios

Abstract

In this article, we propose a reliable and low-latency Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) solution for environmental monitoring in factories at major accident risk (FMAR). In particular, a low power wearable device for sensing the toxic inflammable gases inside an industrial plant is designed with the purpose of avoiding peculiar risks and unwanted accidents to occur. Moreover, the detected data have to be urgently and reliably delivered to remote server to trigger preventive immediate actions so as to improve the machine operation. In these settings, LoRaWAN has been identified as the most proper communications technology to the needs owing to the availability of off the shelf devices and software. Hence, we assess the technological limits of LoRaWAN in terms of latency and reliability and we propose a fully LoRaWAN compliant solution to overcome these limits. The proposed solution envisages coordinated end device (ED) transmissions through the use of Downlink Control Packets (DCPs). Experimental results validate the proposed method in terms of service requirements for the considered FMAR scenario.