Research work on Low-cost IoT-based Downtime Detection for UPS and Behaviour Analysis, carried out by Dr. Sachin Chaudhari along with his student Sannidhya Gupta, 5th-year Dual Degree student and Prakash Nayak, IT staff member, has been awarded the Best Paper Award at the 18th International Conference on Communication Systems & Networks (COMSNETS 2026). The award was presented at the Workshop on AI of Things, held in Bengaluru from 6 – 10 January.  

Here is the summary of the paper as explained by the authors:

This paper presents a low-cost, Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM)-agnostic Internet of Things (IoT)-based system for monitoring the behaviour of Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) units during power outages and recovery. Frequent outages in developing regions cause equipment damage, operational downtime, and data loss. While UPS units provide backup power, affordable options for monitoring their performance remain limited. Commercial solutions such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) cards are expensive, manufacturer-specific, and reliant on network infrastructure, restricting their use in cost-sensitive or remote installations. The proposed system continuously records input and output currents to detect outages, switchovers, and UPS behaviour during these events, operating independently of mains power to ensure uninterrupted data capture. Deployed across 4 UPS installations, it collected over 3.7 million data points and automatically identified 61 outage events. Results demonstrate consistent and accurate detection with real-time visualisation via a web dashboard.

Homepage: https://www.comsnets.org/

January 2026