High Penetration Wireless Networking for Nuclear Power Plant Sensing

Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) operators are facing unprecedented pressure to modernize their fleets for efficiency gains and to enable safe extension of NPP life. Although digitalization projects such as deploying sensors for predictive maintenance are commonplace; it is the extreme construction standards at NPP facilities that make these efforts uniquely challenging. Specifically, wiring was found to be the largest cost barrier when implementing facility sensor upgrades. Naturally, wireless connectivity options that do not suffer from these same drawbacks are of interest to the industry. Unfortunately, the same physical impediments to running wire in a NPP, also present a very challenging radio frequency environment for most wireless sensor technologies. Of the available options, LoRaWAN is deemed to be the best fit. LoRaWAN is a low-power, low-bit-rate wireless protocol with excellent signal-to-noise and unobstructed range. The drawback of LoRaWAN is that it is a star-topology which only supports a single wireless hop. This research addresses these hurdles with a novel and cost effective all-wireless LoRa mesh in combination with LoRaWAN, forming a hybrid interconnection architecture for NPP sensors. LoRaWAN is used to wirelessly connect sensors to gateways. The mesh optimizes wireless routing in the challenging NPP environment using the next generation networking technology, Named Data Networking (NDN). The research objectives of this Phase I project are to: 1) investigate the feasibility of connecting commercial LoRaWAN sensors through an NDN LoRa mesh network, and 2) determine if an intelligent NDN mesh network can efficiently route and deliver aggregate bandwidth sufficient to meet nuclear power plant sensing requirements.