1

Long Range Nuclear Radiation Monitoring System

using LPWAN Technology
Jitendra Goyal, Arpit Khandelwal

Abstract—A nuclear radiation monitoring system with a trans-

mission range of 10 km is developed and validated. The designed
system can be used for remote monitoring of nuclear radiation
and collecting the data at ground stations located far apart from
active site. It can be used to interface any wireless nuclear
radiation sensor and has 10 years of operating lifetime. The
transceiver is implemented using novel Low Power Wide Area
Network (LPWAN) technology which is specially designed for
applications requiring long range transmissions at low data rate.
The experimental testing of designed system shows that dose
rate information can be transmitted upto 10 km in rural and
7 km in urban environment. Moreover, there is possibility of
creating a network where number of different sensors located
geographically apart can transmit to the same base station, thus
providing simultaneous data analysis.
Index Terms—Wireless radiation monitoring, LPWAN, WSN,
CC1310, RSSI.
Fig. 1: Block diagram of proposed nuclear radiation monitoring
I. I NTRODUCTION system

T HE amount of radioactive materials being emitted in

the environment has increased recently due to increasing
nuclear activities for power generation and weapon purposes.
Continuous monitoring of radioactive levels in the environ-
ment has become extremely essential to avoid accidents such
as Fukushima - Daiichi and Chernobyl [1]. Radiation sensors
are deployed in the active areas to measure the concentration
of radioactive substance and their information is transmitted
to the nearest base station for further analysis. Recently
aerial vehicles have been used to monitor the radiation levels
at remote locations [2]. Both manned and unmanned aerial
vehicles with radiation sensors mounted on them have been
deployed [3]. Apart from these, IoT based solutions have also
been proposed for radiation monitoring [4]. Although, such
a system makes it easier to measure radiation in seemingly
inaccessible areas, transmitting the measured radiation dose
to the base station remains a critical issue. With the current
available transceivers in non-licensed spectrum such as XBee
and ZigBee, the maximum achievable transmission range is
upto few meters [5]. This requires either the base station to
be located very close to the radioactive site or use of multiple
transceivers as repeaters in order to increase the transmission
range.
LPWAN is a wireless network designed to allow long
range communication at low bit rates among connected ob-
jects [6], [7]. LPWAN technologies are especially designed
for the applications that require long range, low power and
Jitendra Goyal is with Defence Laboratory, Jodhpur e-mail:
(goyal.8@iitj.ac.in).
Arpit Khandelwal is with Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian
Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India.
low cost operation [8]–[10]. In this technology, long range
communication is achieved by using sub-1 GHz frequency
band which offers robust and reliable communication at low
power budgets. While traditional non-cellular technologies
such as XBee, ZigBee and WiFi operate at 2.4 GHz band, their
communication range is limited because of higher operating
frequency. They also suffer from latency and interference and
number of devices operating in this range are quite high. In LP-
WAN, narrow band and spread spectrum techniques are used
to improve the security and link budget of the system. Simple
and light weight medium access control (MAC) protocols
are used to minimize the power consumption and extend the
operating lifetime of the transceiver. Currently there are several
competing LPWAN technologies such as LoRa, SigFox, NB-
IoT etc. using different techniques to obtain long range, low
power operation [11].
In this paper, an indigenously developed nuclear radiation
sensor is interfaced with an LPWAN module developed by
Texas Instruments to achieve long distance transmission of
the measured dose rate. The experimental evaluation proves
that dose rate information can be successfully transmitted
upto 10 km in rural and 7 km in urban areas. Other qual-
ity metrics of the system such as received signal strength
indicator (RSSI) and packet loss ratio are also measured.
Such a system eliminates the need of having the base station
close to radioactive site or installing multiple repeaters to
increase the communication range. The paper is organized as
follows: section II describes the proposed system design with
detailed hardware specifications and software programming

978-1-7281-4842-7/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE

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Fig. 2: Nuclear radiation sensor DELRAD developed by Defence
Labs Jodhpur (DLJ)
Fig. 3: Output of DELRAD sensor when exposed to nuclear radiation
steps; section III discusses the experimental results in rural
and urban environment and section IV concludes the paper
with future scope of the work.
II. P ROPOSED S YSTEM D ESIGN
The proposed system consists of a nuclear radiation sensor
interfaced with a transceiver module to transmit and receive
the dose rate information. As shown in Fig. 1, the transceiver
module with nuclear sensor attached to it acts as transmitter
while the one with display acts as receiver. The dose rate
information transmitted by the sensor is displayed on the LCD
screen continuously.
The sensor used in our case is DELRAD, which is de-
veloped by Defence Labroatory Jodhpur, India and shown in
Fig. 2. This semiconductor sensor when exposed to gamma
radiation gives digital pulses at the output whose frequency is
proportional to the dose rate as shown in Fig. 3. The sensor
has 2 detectors, a large area detector measuring dose rate upto
5 R/hr and a small area detector for dose rate greater than
5 R/hr. Based on the incident dose rate, the sensor switches
between the 2 detectors. As shown in Fig. 3, a hysteresis of
TABLE I
Relation between Gamma dose rate and CPS for DELRAD
Dose Rate
Counts/Sec
(R/h)
1 64
2.5 167
5 338
10 704
50 3260
100 6350
500 26440
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2
Fig. 4: Setup for testing the functionality of designed system.
4 R/hr is kept to avoid confusion between the detectors at the
time of switching.
The input dose rate is represented as counts per second
(CPS) and their typical values for a small area detector are
shown in Table I. This CPS value is converted into a data
packet by the transmitter module for wireless transmission.
This data packet contains 1 byte of device address, 1 byte
of hardware status, 2 bytes of CPS values and CRC field.
The transceiver module used in this case is CC1310-90 mi-
crocontroller unit (MCU) developed by Texas Instruments Inc.
It is a cost-effective, ultra-low-power wireless MCU capable
of handling sub-1 GHz RF frequencies. Complete technical
details of CC1310 -90 can be found in [12]. For interfacing of
the wireless sensor, the MCU is programmed using the Code
Composer Studio (CCS) integrated development environment.
As the first step of programming, the RF parameters of the
module are set to achieve optimum communication range at
moderate data rate. The list of parameters and their corre-
sponding values are shown in Table II.
III. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
Two types of tests are performed to verify the working of the
designed system. Firstly, the functionality of radiation sensor
is tested using a setup shown in Fig. 4. The DELRAD sensor
is mounted on testing kit and probing is done on analog and
digital output pins. Tektronix MSO 4054 oscilloscope is used
for recording various waveforms. A voltage divider circuit is
used to reduce the amplitude of digital pulses from radiation
sensor output to 3.3 V. These pulses are then fed to DIO23
pin of launch pad kit, acting as transmitter, for counting. To
power up radiation sensor, mounting kit and transmitter kit
dual output power bank is used. The digital pulse at the output
TABLE II
Set of RF parameters for programming of sensor module
Frequency 867 MHz
Deviation ± 5 kHz
Data Rate 5 kbps
Symbol Rate 20 kchips/s
Modulation GFSK
DSSS 2
Rx BW 49 kHz
Tx Power 26 dBm

Fig. 5: Output waveform of DELRAD sensor when irradiated with
dose of Gamma radiation.
Fig. 6: Final output of the designed system showing the radiation
dose and equivalent CPS values.
Fig. 7: Setup for range testing experiment showing transmitter
connected to the power bank and receiver connected to laptop.
of radiation sensor when it is irradiated is shown in Fig. 5.
DELRAD sensor is a hybrid micro circuit that has detectors
for radiation detection and front end electronics to process the
signal from the detector. The analog waveform shown in Fig.
5 is the output of detector and the digital waveform is the
final output of signal processing circuit. These pulses are then
converted into CPS values by the MCU and displayed as the
final output as shown in Fig. 6.
The developed prototype is tested for achievable commu-
nication range in both rural and urban environments with an
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3
Fig. 8: Result of range test in rural environment
aim to maximize the achieved range. Two transceiver modules
(one programmed as transmitter and other as receiver) fixed
on an elevated platform as shown in Fig. 7 are used for the
range test. The transmitter is fixed over the top of a building,
at a height of about 11 m. The receiver is mounted on the roof
of a car and is moved around. Different locations having line-
of-sight communication are identified and total of 500 packets
are transmitted from each location. Based on the number of
packets received at the receiver, packet loss is calculated. In
rural environment, a communication range of about 11 km was
obtained as shown in Fig. 8, when the transmitter was fixed
on the top of Electrical Department building at Indian Institute
of Technology, Jodhpur and receiver was moved around in a
vehicle till the Toll Plaza. This range is obtained for a data
rate of 2.5 kbps where no packet loss is observed till 9.5
km. However, packet loss starts increasing from 9.5 km and
it reaches to 15.15% at a distance of 10.8 km and 46% at 11
km. For increasing data rates, the achievable range steadily
decreases as shown in Fig. 11.
The achievable communication range is found to be depen-
dent on number of parameters such as transmitter power, data
rate, environmental noise floor etc. For the experiments in rural
areas, environmental noise floor was calculated as -120 dBm.
The achievable communication range is found to decrease with
a decrease in transmitted power as shown in Fig. 10.
Similar experiment was performed in densely populated
urban environment inside the Jodhpur city. The transmitter was
kept at the top of Ratanada Palace and receiver was moved in
a vehicle to obtain a range of about 7 kms as shown in Fig.
9. At data rate of 5 kbps, no packet loss observed up to a
distance of 3 km. However, packet loss increases to 2.2% at
4.5 km, 15.69% at 6.5 km and 46.72% at a distance of 7.34
km. After this distance receiver was not able to receive any
packets from transmitter. Moreover, RSSI was also measured
at different distances from the transmitter as shown in Fig.
12. As expected, RSSI is found to decrease with distance and

Fig. 9: Result of range test in urban environment
Fig. 10: Variation in achievable communication range with respect
to transmitter power showing decrease in range with decrease in
transmitter power.
reaching minimum value at around 7 kms. The abrupt rise in
RSSI at 5.5 kms was due to sudden decrease in environmental
noise floor owing to lesser crowded area.
IV. C ONCLUSION
A wireless nuclear radiation monitoring system is developed
and experimentally tested in rural and urban environment.
The designed system consists of a PIN diode based Gamma
radiation sensor interfaced with a transceiver system working
on LPWAN technology. The radiation dose measured by the
sensor is transmitter wirelessly over a secured and reliable link
upto 10 km in rural and 7 km in urban areas. The achieved
transmission range is much greater than those obtained from
other non-cellular technologies such as XBee, ZigBee and
WiFi. A wireless sensor network (WSN) consisting of several
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4
Fig. 11: Variation in achievable communication range with respect to
transmitter data rate showing decrease in range with increase in data
rate.
Fig. 12: Variation of RSSI with distance in urban environment
geographically spaced LPWAN sensors and one receiver at
the base station can be created to effectively monitor a large
area. Such a system and its analysis with respect to reliability,
scalability etc. would be the topic of further research.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Mahaveer Prasad, A.K.
Yadav and Ravindra Kumar, Defence Labs Jodhpur for their
valuable technical inputs.
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