A LoRaWAN Wireless Sensor Network for Data Center Temperature Monitoring

High-performance computing installations, which are at the basis of web and cloud servers as well as supercomputers, are constrained by two main conflicting requirements: IT power consumption generated by the computing nodes and the heat that must be removed to avoid thermal hazards. In the worst cases, up to 60% of the energy consumed in a data center is used for cooling, often related to an over-designed cooling system. We propose a low-cost and battery-supplied wireless sensor network (WSN) for fine-grained, flexible and long-term data center temperature monitoring. The WSN has been operational collecting more than six million data points, with no losses, for six months without battery recharges. Our work reaches a 300x better energy efficiency than the previously reported WSNs for similar scenarios and on a 7x wider area. The data collected by the network can be used to optimize cooling effort while avoiding dangerous hot spots.