Network maintainability and integrability: replacing or adding components in modern networks

For a monitoring network spread across multiple measurement sites to be maintainable by various operators, achieving a complete overcoming of technological lock-in, it is essential that its main components can be integrated or replaced by third-party operators, other than those who originally built the network. The primary components of a remote monitoring network are sensors, dataloggers, and transmission modules.

The datalogger is the heart of the automatic remote monitoring station. It is the electronic control unit that acquires data from the sensors, verifies its quality, performs any necessary processing, and then stores and transmits the information. For civil protection purposes, it is fundamental that these devices have low power consumption, allowing them to be used in monitoring sites where energy is provided by independent power systems, such as batteries and solar panels.

It is therefore extremely useful for any operator tasked with maintaining a monitoring network to be able to replace or integrate new sensors on existing automatic measurement stations. The dataloggers of Compact line support multiple standard interfaces that allow commercial sensors to be changed or added with relative ease. This process is further facilitated by the configurability and programmability of the control units themselves, which aids in the potential integration of proprietary protocols from other manufacturers.

Always with the aim of ensuring the overcoming of lock-in, it is crucial that the datalogger itself is a replaceable component, allowing for third-party products to be used in the event of failure.

The investment CAE has made to combine high-end performance with technological openness involves the implementation of standard interfaces between the company’s sensors and the datalogger, as well as the use of CoAP protocol for communication between the datalogger and the control centre.

In the most modern networks, whether built or fully upgraded by CAE, an operator needing to replace an existing Compact line datalogger with a compatible spare would only need to ensure that it communicates via CoAP and features interfaces to connect to the RÆVO radio, either via serial connection, implementing a PPP protocol, or via Ethernet. Once this is established, it is sufficient to correctly assign the IP address to the new datalogger, following the company's documentation, and the replacement can be completed, communicating via standard CoAP with the central system. The methods used by the datalogger and the control centre are described in the user documentation and are based on standard formats: CoAP with REST APIs, JSON, etc.

To demonstrate this concept even more clearly, we present a short video showing this exact scenario: the installation of a Campbell datalogger, model CR1000X in this case, within a network managed by the DATALIFE PLATFORM software, identical to those currently installed in our clients' most modern control centres.

It is important to emphasize that the programming of the standard CoAP protocol communications on board this datalogger, one of the most widely used in the world, was carried out without relying on any of CAE's proprietary or confidential information.

Similarly, any other modern datalogger that offers user-programmability can be implemented with the required standard protocols and used as a replacement for the Compact unit.