DEVELOPMENT OF A SOFTWARE-BASED MONITORING AND INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR INDUSTRIAL TELEMETRY APPLICATIONS

Industry stands to benefit from adopting Internet of Things (IoT) practices. However, reliability and quality of service are of the utmost importance. Challenges such as intermittent connectivity in wide-area wireless communications can hamper the adoption and efficiency of IoT principles in industry. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to propose a new system that actively monitors the status of a wide-area wireless communications network to improve quality of service and ensure reliability. The new monitoring system was implemented on a telemetry system that is used by multiple industrial facilities in the Republic of South Africa. Successful monitoring of 80 remote end-points with more than one thousand individual industrial components was achieved, with communication failures or anomalies being detected immediately. In addition to the immediate detection of communication failures, the average connection uplink time was increased by more than 25 per cent.