Sistema Redundante de Comunicación de Alarmas de las Plantas de Emergencia en Radio Bases Celulares

Abstract

The Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad y Telecomunicaciones is a leader company in Costa Rica which provides electrical and communication services, it is in charge of land line, mobile phone and internet services. In the last years the institution has been committed to the country to provide a first class service, besides of competing with companies in the field of communications at the forefront of technology. Therefore, it is necessary to administrate the different goods and services. The Electromechanical Process, Operation and Maintenance area are dedicated to preventive and corrective electromechanical maintenance of the National Telecommunication System and it is extremely important to have monitoring emergency plants located in cellular phone base stations, telecommunication area is known as Base Tranceiver Sation (BTS), in order to know different variables necessary for its proper operation. When a fault is indicated or made known to the maintenance staff through phone calls, customer complaints or power cuts made by electricity companies, stealing of equipment (batteries, ground wires, among others) should start the operation emergency plants, but often they don’t start running and the battery bank is not enough to supply the BTS, pulling out the operation and depriving the customers of service. The maintenance area staff has to go to the site without even knows why the emergency plant did not start with normal backup to the power outage. Thus, monitoring the emergency plant is essential to have a clearer picture in an eventuality. We propose a prototype system that allows transmitting alarms, to assist the Operations and Maintenance Department to speed up the process of responding to contingencies generated by different factors already mentioned above. The system is based on the transmission of variables from emergency plants, using two Arduinos, which take care of performing communication by two important means, as it is the GSM / GPRS signal, as well as Ethernet port through (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) WiMAX, obtaining with this a redundant system of communication.