IIIT Hyderabad Smart City Living Lab in collaboration with Silicon Labs conducted Phase I & Phase 2 Launches of Wi-SUN network in the last couple of years and had Wi-SUN FAN1.0 & 1.1 mesh network rollout covering the campus.
The battery powered leaf nodes, a new addition to the Silicon Labs portfolio has come up which can connect the utility networks like water and streetlights to the existing Wi-SUN backbone network in the campus thus enabling uninterrupted communication.
To showcase this functionality, five Leaf nodes (FG28 modules) have been interfaced to the Water nodes and streetlights in IIIT-H campus. This network was officially launched by Dr. Manish Kotari, Senior Vice President of Software Development, and India site head at Silicon Labs on 7 March.
The gathering included Mr. Venkatesh N, Mr. Tarun M, and Mr. Srinivas Rao Dukkipati, from Silicon Labs, Ms Anuradha Vattem, Prof. Ramesh Loganathan, Prof. Aftab Hussain, Prof. Karthik Vaidyanathan and team from IIITH.
Dr. Mainsh. K expressed his appreciation for the remarkable two-plus-year journey with the living lab and extended congratulations to all the faculty, staff and students. He emphasised that this marks the beginning of the FG28 journey, highlighting its capabilities and its value in the field of utility networks. Additionally, he recommended the focus should be not only on extending battery life but also on security and latency aspects.
After the inauguration, Ms. Anuradha Vattem explained about the LFN nodes that were deployed throughout the campus and about how the water meter was integrated with the leaf nodes (LFN). Then, Prof. Aftab Hussain shared his insights on power and battery life of the leaf nodes.
As a part of the discussion, DODAG (connectivity diagram) and the Dashboard were presented to the team. The DODAG connection diagram shows the connectivity between the border router (red), Router node (in green) and LFN nodes (in yellow).
And the Dashboard provides an overview of the deployment of FAN1.0, FAN1.1, and LFN Wi-SUN nodes. As on now, a total of 65 nodes, including router nodes and LFN nodes, Signal parameters such as RSSI and latency and utility parameters like water flow and Luminosity are presented on the dashboard along with the street lights turned on.
Mr. Vaibhav Naware also presented the electric vehicle charging station using the Wi-SUN network. EV charging station has a user-friendly UI and it can be accessed using a RFID. The data management is taken care by the oneM2M platform.
Following the launch, the Smart city living lab and Silicon Labs teams engaged in discussions regarding the various activities to be planned as a part of the collaboration.
Silicon Labs team mentioned that they were happy with the progress made in the campus and were looking forward to run workshops, hackathons and challenges at different levels to bring awareness and more use cases for Wi-SUN network in India.
Ms. Anuradha Vattem noted that Dr. Manish K’s visit to the Smart City Living Lab proved fruitful, as he demonstrated significant interest in the team’s ongoing work and expressed anticipation for the launch of Wi-SUN 4.0. where multiple utility nodes will be connected to Wi-SUN network and tested in the campus.
March 2024