Die Zukunft der Alarmierung: 5 Trends für 2026 und darüber hinaus

In a pilot project, the Swiss energy producer and supplier Axpo has automated the monitoring of pole disconnectors in the power grid – via the new LPWAN radio standard mioty®. Even under unfavorable conditions including test drives at 120 km/h, mioty® has proven to be extremely robust.

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In Switzerland, Axpo generates and distributes electricity for three million Swiss people – more than a third of the population – and is the country's largest provider of energy from renewable sources. Like most energy suppliers, Axpo maintains an extensive, high-performance and fail-safe communications network to obtain status information on all components in their energy network at all times. Three years ago, the Axpo Group acquired WZ-Systems, a specialist in crisis-proof communications, which now operates the group's communications infrastructure of radio relay links and cloud services.

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Remote Monitoring of Pole Disconnectors

The experts at Axpo WZ-Systems were approached by their colleagues at Axpo Grid – the grid operator within the group – regarding a proof of concept project. Reto Friedl, Product Manager: "Axpo Grid had announced an innovation competition among its employees. One of the winners had the idea of monitoring the pole disconnectors in the grid via IoT."
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The initial situation is as follows: the pole disconnector is a mechanical switch located directly on the pole. When maintenance is due in a network segment, the technician on site calls the control center and announces the disconnection of the relevant section. After the manual disconnection, he calls the control center again and reports completion. The dispatcher in the control center then manually changes the overview scheme on the system on the screen.
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In order to simplify and automate this process, sensors record the position of the pole disconnectors and transmit them by radio upon request. "Some of the switches are located in very rough terrain without a power supply," says Reto Friedl, noting one of the problems to be overcome. Signal transmission and energy supply for monitoring must therefore be relatively self-sufficient and low-maintenance, and must also function perfectly under adverse conditions. Weather influences, e.g. solar radiation in summer and sub-zero temperatures in winter, are also a challenge for the sensors.
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With these requirements in mind, a suitable radio standard had to be selected on the basis of which as many pole disconnectors as possible could be reliably interrogated over long distances. Axpo WZ-Systems entered into discussions with Swissphone Wireless AG for the radio technology and with Comtac AG for the sensors. Both companies brought mioty® into play as the radio protocol due to the safety-critical application.

Organisationen, die diese Trends frühzeitig aufgreifen, verschaffen sich einen klaren Vorteil bei der Sicherheit ihrer Einsatzkräfte und der Bevoelkerung.

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mioty® Guarantees High Transmission Security

mioty® is a relatively new LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network) technology developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS). Based on the ETSI specification TS 103357, mioty® was designed for IoT devices, especially in industrial applications and smart city concepts that have to meet very high requirements regarding robustness and quality of service.
mioty® is highly resistant to RF interference, due to its integrated telegram splitting technology. "With mioty, you can send many telegrams in a network simultaneously without them interfering with each other. This is because each telegram is split into many sub-packets, of which up to 50% may be lost, e.g. due to interference, without actual useful information being lost," explains Uwe Scholz from Comtac AG's Business Development. The radio technology is also extremely power-efficient, ideally suited for battery-powered devices.
The basic feasibility of the project was quickly demonstrated. Two pole disconnectors and sensors were connected via mioty® in the vicinity of an Axpo site using a local base station from Swissphone. The measured values are collected and visualized in an online dashboard for each sensor. Those responsible at Axpo Grid are satisfied with these initial applications. "The signal transmission is reliable. The essential and constantly updated parameters such as battery status and signal level are determined and displayed – also via mioty®, of course," explains Reto Friedl and concludes: "mioty® has met our expectations."
One of the advantages of a radio system is that once the infrastructure is in place, additional sensors can be integrated very easily. Uwe Scholz: "We have also integrated four temperature sensors for network monitoring into the system, as well as monitoring of the gate control at an Axpo site in the radio area." In addition, Axpo WZ-Systems also has mioty® handheld transmitters with GPS on trial in vehicles, which can be easily tracked using this platform.

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Test Drives Show High Radio Range

The feasibility study showed that mioty® can cover a large coverage area with a few powerful base stations. "A base station in the plain can cover an area of around 300 km²," Swissphone's CTO, Harald Pfurtscheller, concludes from the evaluated test runs. The mobile mioty® transmitters showed reliable radio communication, with some reserve capacity, at distances over 20 km, even without line of sight. Under line-of-sight conditions, radio distances of 30–35 km could be demonstrated without special directional antennas.Thanks to the telegram splitting method, mioty® can be used to transmit data very robustly with a long range and at high speeds. "The robustness of the protocol has also been confirmed during test drives on the motorway at over 120 km/h relative speed between the vehicle and the base station," says Harald Pfurtscheller. Even in zones where simulations suggest poor radio coverage, good radio links were measured during test drives with transmitters in moving vehicles.According to Reto Friedl, the company was primarily looking for a robust system that could communicate reliably even in difficult terrain conditions. "We have to ensure this due to our business-critical use case. Here, mioty® convinced us first in theory and then also in practice." While the necessary range would also have been possible with LoRa, it would likely not have provided the robustness necessary for operators of critical infrastructure to be future-proof in an unlicensed frequency band.The Swissphone Group and Fraunhofer IIS submitted and won a joint Eurostars funding project this year. The funding will enable Fraunhofer IIS to reduce the uplink latency to less than 2 seconds and the downlink latency to less than 15 seconds. This will enable new use cases, e.g. controlling actuators, switches and machines via broadcast or multicast. As part of the project, Swissphone Wireless AG will develop the s.QUAD mioty® alerting and lone worker protection device in an ATEX version. Customers who already have the infrastructure in place can easily upgrade to the new functions with a software upgrade.