A Multichannel Low-Power Wide-Area Network With High-Accuracy Synchronization Ability for Machine Vibration Monitoring

Vibration-based monitoring is an efficient approach to assess the reliability and performance of industrial machine applications. To meet the requirements of long range, low cost, low power, and high-accuracy synchronous acquisition in Internet of Things (IoT)-based vibration condition monitoring, a new multichannel micro-electromechanical system (MEMS)-based low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) incorporating LoRa with NB-IoT is proposed in this paper. This approach adopts a multichannel LoRa and NB-IoT gateway and multiple wireless MEMS-based LoRa nodes to construct the LPWAN for machine vibration monitoring in plants. Furthermore, Google cloud server and computing system are also able to facilitate the remote IoT-based communication. Finally, evaluations of proposed approach in machine vibration test and data synchronization test on electrical machinery are validated, showing that the proposed multichannel LPWAN monitoring approach has the abilities of high-precision data synchronous collections, big-data storage, and data stream uploading in a wide monitoring area in comparison with wired system and ordinary wireless sensor network-based system. This paper is conducted to provide new insights into how a LPWAN is designed in vibration monitoring for synchronous acquiring sensing data accurately and carrying out remote network communication efficiently, and further giving advisable reference to the LPWAN in more machine vibration monitoring scenarios.