A Data Center Thermal Monitoring System Based on LoRa

Data Centers (DC) requires massive monitoring for thermal and energy efficiency. Currently, popular wireless DC monitoring solutions include Zigbee and Bluetooth, etc. However, these solutions are typically short-range wireless communication technologies, leading to serious scalability issues. In this paper, we design and implement a wireless DC thermal monitoring system based on LoRa (Long Range). The system consists of Data Acquisition Subsystem (DAS), Data Transmission Subsystem (DTS), and Backend Monitoring Subsystem (BMS), where the thermal data are collected via LoRa network with star topology and routed to the BMS for thermal monitoring and fault diagnosis. An advantage of our solution is that the number of nodes that is necessary to cover the data center is significantly reduced due to the long-range communication of LoRa technology. In addition, we further cut the energy consumption of the system by a customized design of the end device such that all irrelevant peripheral components are removed. Finally, we show how dependable and real-time DC thermal monitoring can be achieved by using our solution in a field deployment.