Thermal and energy management system based on low cost Wireless Sensor Network Technology, to monitor, control and optimize energy consumption in Telecom Switch Plants and Data Centres

Inhalt:
Telecom Italia (TI), being one of the top Italian electricity consumers, realized and started to deploy a real-time energy management system (Kaleidos) based on wireless sensor network technology (WSN), to monitor all relevant energy parameters of its switching plants (e.g. per-line energy consumption, room temperatures, humidity and lighting) and to remotely control room temperatures and air conditioning. Among the features of this system we outline: ^- average cost of each measurement point lower than 100 Euro (excluding the service platform); ^- negligible installation and maintenance costs; ^- long life (>2 years, better 3) sensor node battery; ^- reliability, scalability and security; ^- self-configuring WSN. The architecture of the system consists of 4 layers: ^- a low cost set of sensor nodes deployed in each switching plant. Each node includes one or more sensors interfaced with a radio communication chip, compliant to Zigbee Standard; ^- a Gateway for each WSN, which acts as a data sink for the sensor nodes and which connects the WSN to the server platform through an internet connection (LAN or GSM-GPRS); ^- a service platform (WSN-C), able to manage and control different kinds of Sensor Networks (energy management, health care, automotive, ...), to collect and store data and to make them available to applications via a Web Service; ^- a web application which provides a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and data analysis facilities. The first trial started in April 2007 and demonstrated that an energy saving in the order of 10-15 % was possible by simply optimizing the air conditioning system working parameters. In 2008 TI decided to deploy Kaleidos into its 300 larger plants. Typical site consists of 10÷15 rooms, 2000÷6000 m2, 1÷5 GWh/year energy consumption and it is equipped with a sensor network of 20÷30 current nodes and 20÷25 environmental nodes. Kaleidos is used not only to monitor and control the energy and thermal behaviour of sites, but it has been shown to be effective in supporting the design of fine-grained energy saving actions and in real-time evaluation of those actions. Kaleidos is easily extendable to other industrial building or offices and can be interfaced or overlapped to a BMS.