Large area experimental telemetry network for infrastructure monitoring applications

The topic of machine to machine (M2M) communications has gained increasing interest over the recent years. The Lehrstuhl fuer Informationstechnik mit dem Schwerpunkt Kommunikationselektronik (LIKE) and the Fraunhofer IIS have jointly developed an M2M ultra-low power telemetry concept that allows for transmission ranges of up to several km with very tiny transmitter sizes. For testing the performance of our telemetry concept we built up an experimental telemetry network that can be used e.g. for infrastructure monitoring applications. The telemetry network offers a high degree of flexibility based on a software-defined radio architecture for the evaluation and optimization of our telemetry concept. The receiver stations digitize complete frequency bands and transmit the sampled baseband data to a data collection server. Decoders can connect to the data collection server and decode different wireless protocol standards. Finally, the decoded data are written into a database, which makes them accessible for a wide variety of applications. The current network consists of four outdoor receiver stations, which cover a large area in the region of Erlangen/Nuremberg. A continuous temperature measurement demonstrator proves the high reliability of the system.