Performance Evaluation LoRa-GPRS Integrated Electricity usage Monitoring System for Decentralized Mini-Grids

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies such as Long-Range (LoRa), combined with traditional cellular communications technologies such as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) offers decentralized mini-grid companies the opportunity to have cost-effective monitoring systems for the mini-grid resources. Nevertheless, most of the existing decentralized mini-grid companies still rely on traditional cellular networks to fully monitor electricity consumption information, which is not a feasible solution especially for the resource-constrained mini-grid systems. This paper presents the performance evaluation of the proposed LoRa-GPRS integrated power consumption monitoring system for decentralized mini-grid centers. Each mini-grid center consists of a network of custom designed smart meters equipped with LoRa modules for local data collection, while the GPRS gateway is used to transmit collected data from the local monitoring centre to the cloud server. Performance testing was conducted by using five electrical appliances whose power consumption data form the cloud server was compared to the same data collected by using a reference digital meter. The correlation between the two data sets was used as a key performance metric of the proposed system. The performance results show that the proposed system has a good accuracy hence providing a cost-effective framework for monitoring and managing of power resources in decentralized mini-grid centers.