Pass/Fail Quality Assessment in Last Mile Smart Metering Networks Based on PRIME Interface.

Piotr Kiedrowski,Beata Marciniak

doi:10.3390/s21227444

Abstract

The pass/fail form is one of the presentation methods of quality assessment results. The authors, as part of a research team, participated in the process of creating the PRIME interface analyzer. The PRIME interface is a standardized interface—considered as communication technology for smart metering wired networks, which are specific kinds of sensor networks. The frame error ratio (FER) assessment and its presentation in the pass/fail form was one of the problems that needed to be solves in the PRIME analyzer project. In this paper, the authors present their method of a unified FER assessment, which was implemented in the PRIME analyzer, as one of its many functionalities. The need for FER unification is the result of using different modulation types and an optional forward error correction mechanism in the PRIME interface. Having one unified FER and a threshold value makes it possible to present measurement results in the pass/fail form. For FER unification, the characteristics of FER vs. signal-to-noise ratio, for all modulations implemented in PRIME, were used in the proposed algorithm (and some are presented in this paper). In communication systems, the FER value is used to forecast the quality of a link or service, but using PLC technology, forecasting is highly uncertain due to the main noise. The presentation of the measurement results in the pass/fail form is important because it allows unskilled staff to make many laborious measurements in last mile smart metering networks.

Highlights

New measurement techniques solutions are the natural “consequences” of implementing new technologies in communication services
power line communications (PLC) is gaining popularity [5] among other technologies due to its standardization by ITU-T [6,7,8]. These standards define such PLC interfaces as: PoweRline intelligent metering evolution (PRIME), G3-PLC [9], and G.hnem [10]. These interfaces are based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) as physical layers [11] and differential phase shift keying (DPSK) as carrier modulations
The software implementation of the result presentation in the form of past/fail is not difficult if only threshold constant values are known; the difficulty is posed by the unification of the frame error ratio (FER) vs. signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) characteristics to one characteristic, which may act as a reference characteristic

Summary

Introduction

New measurement techniques solutions are the natural “consequences” of implementing new technologies in communication services. Smart metering (SM) systems use wireless [1,2] or power line communications (PLC) [3,4] technologies for last mile network realization. PLC is gaining popularity [5] among other technologies due to its standardization by ITU-T [6,7,8] These standards define such PLC interfaces as: PoweRline intelligent metering evolution (PRIME), G3-PLC [9], and G.hnem [10]. Further software components of the PLC PRIME analyzer are: implementation of ITUT G.9904 protocols, a quality assessment module, a graphical user interface, a reports creator, a remote manager, a statistic data processor, and presenter. The pass/fail presentation form allows unskilled staff to make measurements in a low voltage (LV) power network This method of presentation is useful in a fault localization. The most common fault source, which degrades the communication quality in last mile SM networks based on PLC, is the capacitive load

Problem Definition

The Method for Unified FER Assessment

Discussion