EYE: Rethinking Electrical Distribution Network with Internet of Things

Electrical distribution network is a complex network of electrical components (distribution transformers, circuit breakers etc.) working in harmony to ensure delivery of electricity from generating end to end-consumers. The current methods involves manual monitoring for low kVA transformers with limited manpower and in turn fails to guarantee reliability, availability and quality of service in a distribution system. Considering the existing scenario of rural areas, there are no circuit breakers installed for low kVA transformers which eventually lead to catastrophic failures due to thermal stress, overloading etc. and the restoration process is expensive in terms of manpower, capital and time which cause distress to the end users. In this paper we propose “EYE”, a system which upgrades the conventional electrical distribution network to a smart IOT enabled network with minimal cost expenditures. The proposed system utilizes the heterogeneous distribution of distribution transformers to form an underlying WANET in the RF band of 433–473 MHz along with environmentally resilient sensors. We quantify the results by deploying the proposed system in one of the rural parts of India (Roorkee) with actual distribution network.