Evaluation of smart metering network and billing system using bluetooth, ZigBee, and GSM

Abstract

The necessity of managing energy through smart devices has become a significant issue in recent years. Though, the intelligent use of smart devices is an essential component in creating smart cities. Hence, it leads to establishing a smart grid as an infrastructure for smart cities. The smart grid infrastructure consists of smart meters, which is more reliable than digital meters for billing generation. A real-time smart meter system design is proposed and tested in this work. The measured voltage, current, and power factor for energy are multiplied every second and summed up for overall energy consumption, and this process applies to every consumer. Then, the energy consumption of each house is collected from a single region by sending them to the DCU (Data Concentrator Unit). Methods of transferring data in the proposed system consist of three technologies. The first one is the Bluetooth used between the smart socket and the smart meter. This technology was used due to the short distance between the two devices. The second one is Xbee, and it connects the smart meter and the DCU. This technology is used due to the distance between the two devices and the number of smart meters connected in one DCU. The last technology is GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), and it is used between the DCU and the server to transfer data since this technology can cover long distances. Energy providers will have to implement innovative Time-of-Use (TOU) pricing strategies to implement the above process. A smart meter has the potential to encourage consumers to shift demand from peak hours to off-peak hours or reduce peak demand. And upon the real experiment of the system, it was found that the error rate in the voltage sensor used in the system was 0.26%, and the error rate in the current sensor used was 0.6%. These numbers indicate the reliability of the system because they are acceptable values.