![]() ![]() While the smart grid focuses on the provision of electricity the water sector shares many of the same challenges such as cyber security, scalability, and interfacing with legacy systems. ![]() The smart grid movement mainly focuses on adding communication infrastructure to the existing power system infrastructure to increase efficiency of the whole power system. The movement towards AMR is part of the smart grid movement as well as the bigger smart city movement where technology is being developed and used to improve every aspect of human life with goals such as automation, reducing power consumption, and lowering costs. A rising trend is to either replace or retrofit water meters to enable AMR. Through use of new technologies, utility meters become smart sensor nodes that are part of a sensor network that communicates with a centralized control and data location.ĪMR will not only allow utility companies to collect measurements automatically but also pave the way for remote control and configuration of meters by adding a networked and intelligent electronic controller. To solve these problems utility companies are focusing their attention on technologies which will enable automatic meter reading (AMR). This process is time consuming, inaccurate and susceptible to corruption and theft. These resources are carefully managed to ensure sustainability and customer’s use is recorded for billing as well as demand prediction purposes.Ĭustomers who have a utility meter installed are billed according to their use and this process for water meters traditionally involved an employee from the utility company visiting the premises to manually record the meter’s reading. Residential, commercial, and industrial sectors receive and pay for utilities such as natural gas, electricity, or water through the use of a utility company. The relationship between packet success rate and different packet sizes was also investigated and reducing the packet size with a factor of 16 resulted in either 156% or 300% increases in the amount of successfully received packets depending on the network setup. Further simulations found that the successful transmission of application layer packets in a 70-end node tree network can be improved by 212% when end nodes only transmit data to their nearest router node. This threshold is at a relatively low number of nodes (50) and the use of network topologies such as tree or mesh helps alleviate this problem and results in lower network delays. ![]() The simulations found that once a number of nodes threshold is exceeded the network’s delay increases dramatically regardless of implemented topology. Network simulations are performed on 3 network topologies (star, tree, and mesh) to determine their suitability for smart water meter networks. This paper presents several proposed and existing smart utility meter systems as well as their communication networks to identify the challenges of creating scalable smart water meter networks. ![]()
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