2010 International Conference On Computer Design And Appliations (ICCDA 2010)

A Wireless Solution for Substation Perimeter Safety Monitoring System Based on

ZigBee Communication Technology

Yang Junjie Lv Jian, Wei Chunjuan

Shanghai University of Electric Power Shanghai University of Electric Power
Shanghai, China Shanghai, China
E-mail: yangjunjie@gmail.com E-mail: Ivjianjl@163.com

Abstract-Aiming at the disadvantage of current anti-theft mainly used as a low data rate monitoring and controlling
alarm technology for substation perimeter security, a novel sensor network [1]. Intended to transmit the signal high­
laser alarm system based on ZigBee is proposed in this paper. effectively, reliably and timely, the main circuit is
The alarm system consists of two parts, i.e., laser railing constituted by Zig8ee wireless sensor [2] and the monolithic
security subsystem and data central monitoring subsystem. integrated circuit, and the electric circuit is simple, easy to
The former is completed by laser deveices and single-chipped
debug and the maintenance. Once the invasive signal is
computer, the later is designed by use of VC language, and the
detected, the system will initiate the on-site deterrent such as
communication between the two subsystems is realized by
althorn and searchlight to warn the intruder, and send alarm
ZigBee wireless technology. The whole design scheme, the
signal to the remote PC at the duty room by ZigBee wireless
frame of hardware system, and the basic idea of the software
sensor and display the detail site on the display interface.
design are described in detail. By running this system, a real­
Meanwhile, the system will send the alarm signal to the on
time human-machine interface can be provided for the user. It
duty operator in short message form by GPRS network.
can be applied in various unattended sites and the plants
difficult to be patrolled. Therefore, the studied system is viewed as an ideal alarm
system to protect the equipments and property from being
Keywords-ZigBee technology; laser; transform substation; damaged.
alarm system The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses
the whole architecture of the system, including the system
working principle. Section 3 describes the laser railing
1. INTRODUCTION security subsystem of the proposed system. Section 4
With the continuous requirements of substation provides the implementation of the data central monitoring
automation, there is a higher demand for automatic subsystem. And finally, we conclude this paper in section 5.
distribution system to monitor the situation of the whole
II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
power grid respectively. The implement of self-service
substation has lead to security threats of power equipment
A. System Configuration
and power line. There are two kinds of substation burglar
alarm system at present. One is wired anti-theft system,
adopting the technology of ac high voltage grid and
electronic pulse fence. The system has an overwhelmingly
deterrent effect, however, it affects the beauty and exist
many defects such as wiring difficulty, high cost and it is
inconvenient to maintenance. Moreover, due to its high
voltage, it may also cause personal dangerousness. The other
one is wireless alarm system, and the infrared electronic
railing technology is the typical representative, which can
stop intruders well and can cause no damage to the human
body. But, it still has many shortcomings, for example, it
costs high energy consumption, and it is susceptible to be
interfered by the changed environment thereby causing false
alarm.
This paper proposes a wireless intelligent security alarm
system based on Zig8ee, which has the advantage of high
security, small power consumption and low false-negatives.
The system using laser to install the fence, for it owns
Figure 1. Structure principle chart of the whole system
excellent directivity and monochromaticity which is
generated by small power launcher. Zig8ee is a low cost, The structure principle chart of the substation perimeter
low power, low complexity, and low data rate wireless safety monitoring system is illustrated in Figure 1.
communication technology. Based on IEEE 802.15.4, it is

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 2010 International Conference On Computer Design And Appliations (lCCDA 2010)

As depicted, a ZigBee based alarming system is That is to say, each unit contains four bunches of parallel
implemented for monitoring and safeguarding the substation. lasers, as shown in Figure 2. In the system, the highness
The system is composed by laser railing security subsystem between each pair of emitter and receiver is 20cm. The
and data central monitoring subsystem. The former part longest distance of each emitting terminal and receiving
consists of N groups of laser devices, boundary monitoring terminal is about 100 meters. Each of the laser emitter and
terminals and alarming units. The later part contains a center receiver are marked with serial numbers, is helpful to locate
control host and a data server. The N groups of on-site the accurate intruding site.
I I
monitoring equipments, controlled by the center control host \\'0111 wall
remotely, form the alert zone. L�t:T
cmiuer
ZO<:m
B. System Overview Lu 'er fence
Emjtting f.i:t:l,:l,!i,\.jng .... _ .. __.. ___ .... ___ .... ___ .. .
The center control host controls remote N groups of termmol h:rll1Il1;tl

scene monitoring equipments to carry on deployment for

defense, that is, to enter or withdraw automatic monitoring
condition. Simultaneously, it receives the radio wave from l,- __ �v ) �
the N groups of scene monitoring equipment sending back, 100m
N pairs of laser devices
thereby it instructs the normal work condition or cross­
border condition and than start the acousto-optic warning or Figure 2. Laser fence.
not. Amount of laser emitter and receiver are fixed on the
perimeter wall of the substation, the laser receivers receive
B. Boundary Monitoring Terminal
multiple parallel invisible laser beam launched by laser
emitter, forming a light loop, just like a ring-like railing. The main circuit of boundary monitoring terminal is
When intruder traverse the alert zone illegally, the light loop composed by microcontroller (MeU) and digital signal
will be cut. The receiving terminal will collect the abnormal processing (OSP) unit, and it is responsible for collecting
condition and emerge interrupt to startup the warming unit to information and responding to control commands issued by
carry on the acousto-optic warning, and at the same time, it control center. The MeU is mainly used for controlling
will encode the intruding signal and send it to the center station-side system. The OSP unit has strong data processing
control host through the ZigBee wireless communication unit. capabilities, thus it can complete the on-site monitoring. As
The data server in the duty room will receive the signal from shown in Figure 3, the internal structure of boundary
the center host, and displays the site of invasion on the monitoring terminal includes power module, laser
display interface. To cater for the needs of unattended emitterlreceiver, OSP, MeU, ZigBee communication
substation, the system will send messages to report the module and alarming unit.
invasion signal at the same time. In addition, the person on
duty can also control the center control host by SMS [3).

III. LASER RAILING SECURITY SUBSYSTEM

Laser railing security subsystem is composed by the laser

fence, boundary monitoring control terminal, ZigBee I'owtr
communication module andalarming modules. The design nlod ,d" I---..j
l...-_,--_-'
and implementation of the whole system is the key point of
the entire system. The main function of laser fence is to
monitor the invasion signal. Boundary monitoring terminal,
as a control point, is located in the vicinity of laser fence, to
acquire, transmit and control the invasion signal. The
handling ability to the changed signal and the precision of
the terminal will affect the final performance of the overall
system. Figure 3. Internal structure of boundary monitor terminal.

A. Laser Fence
The main function of the laser fence is to monitor the
intruding signal. Under normal circumstances, the receivers
receive the laser signal from the emitter constantly, and the
system is operating normally. Once intruders try to enter the
substation, the light loop will be cut off, and the receiving
terminal will detect the changed signal and transmit it
through ZigBee communication Networks.
In order to avoid the false alarm caused by the small
animal like cat and bird, each fence has four pairs of parallel
laser transmission/receiver along the vertical post direction,
When the laser loop is cut off, the output voltage of laser
receiver will be changed. The changed voltage is detected by
OSP unit, and then the processed signal is sent to Meu to
make the judgment. If it is not intruding signal, then the
system will ignore it. If it is, Meu will execute interrupts
immediately and initiate alarming unit to carry on acousto­
optic warning. In this case, the Meu encodes the invasion
information including the serial number of the laser
emitterlreceiver into data frame format, which is transmitted
by the ZigBee communication module. The ZigBee

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 2010 International Conference On Computer Design And Appliations (ICCDA 2010)
communication unit can also receive the control signal from
the center control host to tum off the althorn and searchlight.
The receiving terminal collects the four signals from the
laser emitter, and makes the judgment. If two or more
bunches of laser are cut off, the alarming unit will be
initiated. Through this method, the system has eliminated the
interference effectively and improved the accuracy of the
system largely.
In the proposed system, we choose
microcontroller, which is widely used currently. The Atmel
AT89C51 is a low-power, high-performance CMOS 8-bit
microcomputer with 4K bytes of Flash programmable and
erasable read only memory (PEROM). The device is
manufactured using Atmel's high-density nonvolatile
memory technology and is compatible with the industry­
standard MCS-51 instruction set and pinout. By combining a
versatile 8-bit CPU with Flash on a monolithic chip, the
Atmel AT89C51 is a powerful microcomputer
provides a highly-flexible and cost-effective solution to
many embedded control applications.
C. ZigBee Network
ZigBee is the global wireless language
dramatically different devices to work together and enhance
everyday. ZigBee is a standard developed by an industrial
alliance for wireless radio networks in monitoring and
control applications [4, 5]. ZigBee operates in the unlicensed
radio frequency (RF) bands - 868, 915 and 2400 MHz.
These three bands provide a total of 27 channels with RF
data rates of 20, 40 and 250kbps, respectively, and it is
sufficient for monitoring wild substation [6,7]. The 2.4 GHz
band is widely used because it is unlicensed worldwide has
the highest data rate with more channel options. ZigBee
technology is designed to be used on applications that
require low data rate, low-cost, low power consumption, and
two way wireless communications. When it is not in use, the
sleep modes can enable the RF module to enter states of low­
power consumption, which can lengthen battery lifetime.
ZigBee is a protocol that uses the 802.15.4 standard as a
baseline and adds additional routing and networking
functionality, which is mainly used in sensor networks,
automatic meter reading, medical monitoring and industrial
control [8]. Therefore, it is used to deploy
monitoring networks to enhance perimeter protection.
Star, tree and mesh network topologies can be realized
with ZigBee, and the ZigBee based alarming system uses the
star network topologies. Messages in the ZigBee star
topology network can be point-to-point,
multicast. However, point-to-point messages cannot be sent
in parallel since the network uses a single RF channel.
ZigBee is designed to be tolerant to RF interference and
employs a few mechanisms to provide robust
communications. The indoor experiments experience loss of
the direct line of sight component, whereas the outdoor
experiment always has a strong line of sight component,
especially to the field substation. The signal strength
experiment revealed fluctuating results for the indoor
experiment, whereas the outside experiment showed that the
nodes have an effective working range of 160 meters with
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low packet loss and without breaking the connection. Digi
International MaxStream product-XBee-PRO ZNet 2.5, the
new enhanced version, is selected in the proposed system.
XBee-PRO XSC OEM RF modules are extended-range 900
MHz embedded wireless solutions providing end-point
connectivity to devices. Designed for maximum range, the
XBee-PRO XSC is ideal for solutions where RF penetration
and absolute transmission distance are paramount to the
Intel 8051 application, and its communication distance may reach
1600m. The wireless nature of ZigBee helps to overcome the
troublesome installation problem with the existing burglar
alarm systems identified earlier.
The network consists of a coordinator, routers and
several end devices, which is shown in Figure 4. The ZigBee
coordinator is responsible for creating and maintaining the
network, is set in the center control host in the proposed
system. During the network initialization phase, the
which coordinator scans the available radio channels to find the
most suitable. Normally this will be the channel with the
least activity, in order to reduce the level of interference.
After the coordinator's initialization phase the coordinator
enters "coordinator mode", during this phase it awaits
connecting requests from ZigBee devices to join the network.
A ZigBee end node, as the wireless alarming sensor
network node, integrated with each monitoring terminal, is
the basic unit of the network system. As the devices are
started, during their respective initialization stage, the node
scans for available channels to identifY the network it wishes
to join. The node sends a request to the network coordinator
to join the network. The request is sent to the coordinator
directly or through a neighboring router on the desired
network with which the node shares the best signal. On
receipt of the request the coordinator judges whether the
requesting monitoring terminal is permitted to connect to the
wireless alarming network. In order to enhance the systems
security, the proposed system encrypts all terminal
communications including the requests to join the wireless
network with a private key. Only those devices that are in
possession of the correct private key can successfully
connect to the network. The responsibility of the wireless
monitoring sensor node includes detecting the changed
signal from the monitoring terminal, sending it to the routers,
wireless and waiting for the commands from the routers which is
original from the monitoring control center.
IV. DATA CENTRAL MONITORING SUBSYSTEM
As shown in Figure. 4, the data central monitoring
broadcast or subsystem mainly consists of the center control host, and the
monitor central sever. The center control subsystem locating
in the monitoring center of the substation is to receive the
collected data. It compresses and aggregates the information,
and then sends data via serial communication to the monitor
central server.
V4-522 Volume 4
 2010 International Conference On Computer Design And Appliations (ICCDA 2010)

DIIW ct::nlJ11I moniloring sub »'I;tem server through the simple operation and the human-machine

Sat:8ba.
interface intuitively. The operator may also momentarily
inquire the historical warning record through visiting
Ccoter
database.
coolrol bost
5(>rl:a1
t
C0l!1flllUlltjldOl1 I V. CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, a novel laser alarm system based on ZigBee

...
Figure 4. Data central monitoring subsystem.
The intrusion alarm signals from the boundary monitoring
terminals are received by the ZigBee coordinator, processed
by the signal processing unit and finally sent to the MCU.
Then, MCU sends the signal to the monitor central server
and at the same time sends the signal to the on duty operator
via the GPRS wireless communication unit. The monitor
central server contains 3 parts, i.e., data receiving server,
database server and monitor server. The data receiving
server receives data from the coordinator through serial port,
�
wireless communication technology is proposed. The
Monitor crJltral
architecture of laser alarm system is described in detailed.
The system use laser fence to detect the invasion signal, thus
low false-alarm rate can be achieved. In addition, the ZigBee
wireless communication technology make the alarm signal
transmisstion become easy, which also reduce the wiring
work. The proposed system is suitable for a wide range,
except for the substation perimeter. It can also be applied to
other large-scale area, such as airports, military base, and
residential quarters and so on. Therefore, the designed
system has more extensive application prospects.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This paper was supported by Shanghai Key Research
Project (08160510600, 09160501700), and Innovation
Program of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission
(09ZZ185, 09YZ337).
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