A battery powered RTU: GPRS vs 3G comparison: IEEE Urucon 2017 paper 101
Juan Pablo Becoña, Ana Sofia Pereira, Cristian Vazquez, Alfredo Arnaud · 2017
In this work, a detailed experimental characterization of GPRS and 3G data transmission energy consumption, in a custom Remote Telemetry Unit (RTU) is presented. This comparison results valuable for the design of low data-rate, battery-powered, RTUs until reliable and wide spread IoT networks specifically developed for this type of application in suburban areas are available (probably not before 2 years). The proposed RTU is aimed at illegal logging detection in protected forests, by acoustic signal processing. The RTU sends daily data and alarms to a host server through the GPRS or 3G network and the Internet, and is powered for 3 years from a single 2200mAh primary battery.