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Remote Monitoring of Power Frequency Electrical

Signals Employing GSM Network
Riddhi Ghosh, Biswendu Chatterjee, Member, IEEE,
Debangshu Dey, Member, IEEE, Sovan Dalai, Member, IEEE and Sivaji Chakravorti, Senior Member, IEEE
Department of Electrical Engineering
Jadavpur University
Kolkata, India

network in sending some technical information is a lucrative

option that may be explored. Further, such an application will
require no separate expenditure on account of infrastructural
setup. Data transmission capability of voice channel may be
applied to communicate various types of information,
including the information regarding the condition of a system.
In electrical systems, different types of waveforms are
generated which contain information regarding the condition
of various equipment. The generated waveform may be
transmitted from the equipment to a remote location
conveniently by employing the existing mobile network. The
waveform received at the remote location may be useful for
analyzing the condition of the equipment. The innovative
application of condition diagnosis using mobile
communication makes it possible to send warning signals
whenever a particular parameter exceeds a threshold value.
The greatest advantage of such a mobile communication
based condition diagnosis system is the continuous access of
the monitoring system irrespective of time and location. The
system can automatically alert the concerned personnel when
the condition of the monitored equipment becomes abnormal,
thus increasing the overall effectiveness of the whole system.
As far as remote condition monitoring is concerned,
solutions employing a dedicated network are commercially
available. The Leakage Current Monitoring System (LCMS)
described in [4] employs an optical fiber technology for
monitoring leakage current in high voltage insulators.
However, the widespread implementation of such modules
involves considerable expenditure on account of the huge cost
of such a dedicated network. Yet another possibility is the use
of web-based services, which requires the availability of web
services at individual monitoring modules.
Considering the above facts, this paper describes a
methodology for remote sensing and transmission of power
frequency electrical signals based on GSM voice-channel.
However, there are some difficulties involved in transmitting
non-speech signals over the mobile network. To overcome
these problems, some typical features of the signal waveform
are extracted. Data pertaining to these extracted features are
encoded onto speech-like symbols. These speech-like symbols
are then transmitted over the GSM voice-channel to the remote
location. At the remote location, the received signal is used to
obtain a replica of the original signal.

Abstract Mobile phones are the backbone of modern day

communication system and have undergone an immense growth
in recent years. The use of mobile phones is no longer limited
only to the traditional applications of call and messaging.
Current research trends indicate that mobile phones are being
used for a variety of innovative applications such as mobile-based
sensing and data communication. With this in mind, and with
such widespread availability of mobile towers and ready
infrastructure, a unique application of the mobile network can be
to communicate technical information regarding the condition of
an electrical system. Thus, this paper proposes a method,
whereby it is possible to transmit power frequency electrical
signals over the GSM voice channel. as a means for low cost, yet
state of the art, remote condition monitoring system.
Keywords harmonics, remote condition monitoring, mobile
communication, GSM voice-channel, power quality

I.

INTRODUCTION

Mobile phones have become the most critical device for

personal communication at present. Mobile phones are
inexpensive, easy to use, comfortable and equipped with
almost every latest feature one can think of. In addition to the
traditional use of mobile phones for personal communications
in the form of call and messaging, they serve a multitude of
other functionalities. With the popularity of the smart phones
on the rise, the modern day mobile phones come equipped
with a variety of sensor-based applications that have
revolutionized the way mobile phones are being used. Mobile
phones have various sensors such as camera, WiFi/3G/4G
interfaces, accelerometer, digital compass, GPS, gyroscope,
microphone and so on. These sensors have applications in a
variety of domains ranging from healthcare, environmental
monitoring, safety and transportation [1]. With the mobile
network existing almost in all parts of the world, data
communication based on voice channel is also a popular area
of research. Applications such as adding data transmission
capability to voice-channel [2] and use of voice channel in
mobile transaction technology [3] are some of the recent
research areas that have been addressed in the literature.
Pertaining to the present scenario of mobile phone based
sensing and data communication, and with such abundance of
mobile towers all over the world, using the existing mobile

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II.

of speech-like symbols. Thus, the codebook search approach

mentioned in the previous section is difficult to apply to
transmit electrical signals. Hence, a modified scheme is
required to send power frequency electrical signals over the
GSM voice channel.
In order to demonstrate the developed scheme, this paper
uses some power quality disturbance signals as test
waveforms. Power signals in electrical network are
contaminated with various types of power quality
disturbances. If these disturbances are not detected and
corrected, they can lead to failure of the equipment connected
at the consumer end. Thus, it is important to detect and
classify such power quality disturbances.
The power quality events that are used as test waveforms in
this paper are given in Table I. These signals are generated
according to IEEE Std. 1159-1995 [9].

CHALLENGES IN TRANSMISSION OF NON-SPEECH

SIGNALS OVER THE GSM VOICE-CHANNEL

The GSM voice channel is designed in such a way that it

allows signals with frequencies between 300 Hz and 3 kHz to
pass through it. It is difficult to transmit electrical signals
using this limited bandwidth since most electrical signals have
frequencies that do not fall within this range. Power frequency
electrical signals have a fundamental frequency of 50 Hz and
will be blocked by the GSM voice-channel. Besides, the voice
channel can transmit only those signals that have properties of
speech signals and will severely distort all non-speech signals.
The GSM terminal extracts speech-specific features from a
speech signal by applying different speech compression
techniques. The input speech signal is split into small
windows and the features are extracted from each windowed
speech segment by applying appropriate speech production
models [5]. These extracted speech parameters are sent over
the voice channel to the receiving mobile phone. When the
transmitted signal is received at the other end, the extracted
speech parameters are used to produce a replica of the original
input speech. Though the reconstructed speech at the receiving
mobile phone has a similar aural perception as the original
speech, a sample-by-sample matching of their waveforms is
never obtained. Thus, electrical signals that do not possess the
characteristics of speech signals will not pass through such an
intricate system without undergoing severe distortions. Thus,
transmission of non-speech signals over the GSM voice
channel is a challenging task.
Since only speech-like signals may be sent over the GSM
voice channel, a suitable modulator is required to transmit nonspeech signals that can transform the input signal into a speechlike waveform. Different methods have been proposed in the
area of digital data transmission that can communicate nonspeech information over the voice channel, as an alternative to
the data channel [2, 3, 6-8]. In most of the reported methods, a
set of speech-like symbols have been designed through the use
of speech-production models. The digital data bits are encoded
onto these speech-like symbols. The speech-like signal
sequence so obtained is then fed to the GSM terminal. At the
receiving end GSM terminal, the received signal sequence is
analyzed and the symbol that was most likely to have been
transmitted is determined based on a code-book search. The
encoded digital data are then extracted from the speech-like
symbols. In the present work, this technique of digital data
transmission has been adopted to transmit electrical signals
over the GSM network.
III.

TABLE I.

POWER QUALITY EVENTS

Power Quality Events

Pure Sag
Pure Swell
Harmonics
Momentary Interruption
Sag with Harmonic
Swell with Harmonic

A. Schematic Arrangement of the System

The schematic arrangement of the setup has been shown in
Fig. 1. The power signal from the socket is fed to a signal-to
speech modulator unit. The modulator converts the power
frequency electrical signal into a speech-like signal sequence.
This speech-like signal is fed to the microphone input of a
GSM mobile phone. During a voice call, the signal is
transmitted as in any ordinary voice call. The receiving end
GSM phone is connected to a personal computer, which
extracts the original signal from the received speech-like
sequence.

TRANSMISSION OF ELECTRICAL SIGNALS USING GSM

VOICE CHANNEL

As stated earlier, the transmission of electrical waveforms

using mobile communication has a useful application in
remote diagnosis of electrical systems. Different power
frequency signals are generated in any electrical system that
can indicate the condition of the system. However,
transmitting electrical signals over the GSM voice channel is a
difficult task because the information contained within a
signal waveform is too vast to be compressed into a finite set

Fig. 1. Schematic of Experimental Setup.

B. Speech-like Symbol Design

Speech-like symbols are generated using a linear prediction
based speech modeling technique [3]. Each of the designed
symbols is of 30 ms duration. The speech-like symbol set
designed consists of two poorly correlated symbols only, one
representing binary 1 and the other representing binary 0.



C. Synthesis of the Speech-Like Signal Sequence from

Leakage Current Data
In the present scheme developed for transmitting electrical
signals over the GSM voice channel, the harmonic information
contained in the power quality signals are extracted. The
harmonic information, in the form of amplitude and phase of
the harmonics, is broken up into binary bit streams. The 1
and 0 of the binary sequence are represented by two poorly
correlated speech-like symbols of 30 ms duration each.
The power quality signals may be represented as a sum of
sinusoids having amplitude Ak and phase k for the kth
harmonic, and noise n(t) as

IV.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

Different signals corresponding to the power quality events

mentioned in Table I were used as test waveforms for the
developed scheme. The test waveforms were transmitted over
the GSM voice channel between two GSM mobile phones.
Experiments were carried out with multiple signals of each
power quality event and not much deviation was found in any
of the cases. The first 10 harmonics are considered in the
depicted cases. A comparison between the original signals sent
and the reconstructed signals at the remote terminal have been
shown for some of the power quality events tabulated in Table
I. Fig. 2 depicts the waveforms for signals with harmonics,
Fig. 3 depicts the waveforms for signals with momentary
interruptions and Fig. 4 depicts the waveforms for signals with
swell and harmonics.

s (t ) = Ak sin( kt + k ) + n(t )

k =1
(1)
Synchronous detection is an effective technique employed
for extracting the harmonic components of such a signal
comprising of multiple harmonics along with some random
noise [10]. Once the amplitude and phase information of the
harmonics are extracted using synchronous detection, they are
converted into a speech-like signal sequence.
The speech-like signal synthesis is carried out using the
following steps:
The amplitude and phase of the harmonic
components upto the nth order is determined for each
power frequency cycle of power quality signal.
The extracted amplitude and phase information for
each harmonic component is converted to Na and Nbit binary numbers respectively.
The information corresponding to a single harmonic
component is represented as a bit stream of Na bits
representing the amplitude, followed by N bits
representing the phase.
The bit stream is transformed into a speech-like
signal by a data to speech modulator. Each 1 and
0 of the bit stream is denoted by two separate
speech-like symbols of 30 ms duration. The bit
stream is represented as a signal sequence with two
speech-like symbol combinations.
All the harmonic components upto order n is
transformed by the above mentioned method into a
speech-like signal sequence. Total number of bits
required to represent one power frequency cycle of
the signal is n*(Na+N) bits and the length of the
synthesized signal is 30*n*(Na+N) ms.

1
0.8

Normalized Voltage(V)

0.6
0.4
0.2
0
-0.2
-0.4
-0.6
-0.8
-1

10

20

30

40

50
60
Time(ms)

70

80

90

100

Fig. 2. Power Quality Disturbance Signal with Harmonics for Original

Signal and
Reconstructed Signal at Remote Terminal
1.5

Normalized Voltage(V)

0.5

-0.5

-1

-1.5

20

40

60

80

100
120
Time(ms)

140

160

180

200

Fig. 3. Power Quality Disturbance Signal with Momentary Interruption for

Original Signal and
Reconstructed Signal at Remote Terminal
1
0.8
0.6
Normalized Voltage(V)

The above mentioned method is followed for each cycle of

power quality disturbance signal that is to be transmitted. At
the receiving end GSM terminal, a personal computer is
connected to the receiving GSM phone via an ordinary audio
cable. A software is used to decode the received speech-like
signal by reversing the mentioned scheme. The speech-like
signal frames are extracted from the received signal. The
symbols extracted are compared with the two speech-like
symbols that are used in the original signal, to decide which
symbol was most likely to be sent.

0.4
0.2
0
-0.2
-0.4
-0.6
-0.8
-1

20

40

60

80

100
120
Time(ms)

140

160

180

200

Fig. 4. Power Quality Disturbance Signal with Swell and Harmonics for
Original Signal and Reconstructed Signal at Remote Terminal



existing GSM network, unlike most other remote monitoring

techniques that involve dedicated communication networks.
With the widespread use of cellular technology, it is possible to
monitor the performance of equipment from almost anywhere,
irrespective of time and location. Thus, the accessibility of the
mobile network makes the mobile communication based
condition monitoring system a lucrative option.

The typical normalized root mean square deviations

between the original signals and reconstructed signals for the
different power quality events have been shown in Table II,
for different order of harmonics considered.
TABLE II.

Power Quality
Events
Pure Sag
Pure Swell
Harmonics
Momentary
Interruption
Sag with
Harmonic
Swell with
Harmonic

NORMALIZED ROOT MEAN SQUARE DEVIATIONS OF

DIFFERENT POWER QUALITY EVENTS
Normalized Root Mean Square Error
No. of
No. of
No. of
Harmonics=20
Harmonics=5 Harmonics=10
0.57%
0.57%
0.57%
0.60%
0.60%
0.60%
2.56%
0.95%
0.95%
0.70%

0.63%

0.63%

1.08%

0.55%

0.55%

2.50%

V.

0.95%

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work has been supported by UPE Phase II, Jadavpur
University.

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0.95%

CONCLUSIONS

This paper presents a scheme that may be employed for

remote communication of electrical signals based on GSM
network. The problem associated with transmitting electrical
signals have been discussed in the paper, and the scheme
proposed has been shown to successfully overcome those
problems. The steps of the proposed scheme can be
summarized as follows: The signal to be transmitted over the
GSM voice channel was fed to the modulator. The harmonic
information contained in the electrical signal, in the form of
amplitude and phase, was extracted. The harmonic information
was represented as a continuous bit-stream consisting of the
amplitude and phase values of each harmonic component. A
speech-like signal sequence was obtained from the bit-stream
that could pass through the GSM network with minimum
distortion. Finally, at the remote terminal, the binary bit-stream
was recovered and the harmonic information was extracted.
The leakage current waveform was reconstructed from the
extracted harmonic information. The deviation between the
original signal and the reconstructed signal at the remote
terminal was found to be within acceptable limits.
The present scheme describes a unique application of
mobile communication in the area of remote monitoring of
electrical equipment. A major advantage of the developed
scheme is that it does not need any specialized hardware at the
remote end to access the data. Besides, the scheme utilizes the