Dubai: DEWA’s Research and Development (R&D) Centre has developed an in-house, versatile gateway that can connect terrestrial sensors to satellites and ground networks. The gateway has various physical, operational technology (OT) connectivity and IoT edge protocol libraries to support the latest IoT communication network like LoRa, Wi-Fi & BLE. The device is designed to suit various industrial applications such as utilities, infrastructure, asset-tracking, agriculture, smart cities, fleet management and others.
The device has a long battery life to support various LoRa protocols and LoRaWAN to communicate directly with several satellites and terrestrial network, which contributes to a significant reduction in device and operational costs. The device complies with international IoT device security standards, including OT security. The device was fully designed, fabricated and tested at DEWA’s R&D Centre and its enclosure was manufactured at the R&D’s labs using 3D printing.
“This will increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our planning, operations, and preventive maintenance for our production, transmission, and distribution divisions, as well as our smart grids and electric vehicle charging stations. It also reduces costs, improves asset use, enables knowledge and experience transfer, and trains Emiratis at DEWA. The R&D Centre contributes to achieving national aspirations in the space sector. DEWA’s 3U nanosatellite DEWA-SAT1 and its second nanosatellite DEWA SAT-2, a 6U nanosatellite, were designed and developed at the Centre, making DEWA the world’s first utility to use nanosatellites to enhance the maintenance and planning of electricity and water networks,” Mr. Al Tayer added.
Mr. Waleed Bin Salman, Executive Vice President of Business Development and Excellence at DEWA, highlighted that DEWA leverages the Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies to provide value from the data received from its IoT terminals via the satellite constellation network.
DEWA uses the digital IoT platform hosted by its data centre operated by MORO hub, the backbone of digital DEWA, to enable the terrestrial IoT communications of the developed gateways and to visualise the collected data.