Real Time Vehicle Status Monitoring under Moving Conditions Using a Low Power IoT System

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), the ever-increasing number of devices connected to the IoT networks also increases the energy consumption on the edge. This is prohibitive since the devices living on the edge are generally resource constrained devices in terms of energy consumption and computational power. Thus, trying to tackle this issue, in this paper, a fully automated end-to-end IoT system for real time monitoring of the status of a moving vehicle is proposed. The IoT system consists mainly of three components: (1) the ultra-low power consumption Wireless Sensor Node (WSN), (2) the IoT gateway and (3) the IoT platform. In this scope, a self-powered WSN having ultra-low energy consumption (less than 10 mJ), which can be produced by environmental harvesting systems, is developed. WSN is used for collecting sensors’ measurements from the vehicle and transmitting them to the IoT gateway, by exploiting a low energy communication protocol (i.e., BLE). A powerful IoT gateway gathers the sensors’ measurements, harmonizes, stores temporary and transmits them wirelessly, to a backend server (i.e., LTE). And finally, the IoT platform, which in essence is a web application user interface (UI), used mainly for almost real time visualization of sensors’ measurements, but also for sending alerts and control signals to enable actuators, installed in the vehicle near to the sensors field. The proposed system is scalable and it can be adopted for monitoring a large number of vehicles, thus providing a fully automatic IoT solution for vehicle fleet management. Moreover, it can be extended for simultaneous monitoring of additional parameters, supporting other low energy communication protocols and producing various kinds of alerts and control signals.