Routing Redundancy Reducing Method for U-Bus Air Using Cloud Cooperation

Abstract

U-Bus Air is a wireless communication standard for metering systems, targeting gas supplies with a multi-hop network function. As a multi-hop wireless network, U-Bus Air gathers meter reading information connected to a monitoring center. The terminal with the function of connecting to a monitoring center is called a gateway (GW). The multi-hop function is used to connect GWs; this reduces the cost of connecting wide-area wireless networks. However, the order of installing a new terminal is random because it is determined by timing of replacement on meter in individual homes on meters in individual homes. As a result, the installing location of GWs cannot be specified in advance. Consequently, any created network topology will exhibit redundancies, such as unnecessary GWs, or generate many small networks. In this paper, we propose two different redundancy reducing methods that use information of terminals on cloud to reconstruct a network topology. The proposed methods consists of three steps: gathering information, emulating the topology to reduce redundancy using cloud, and providing feedback to rebuild information of each smart meter. We perform a computer simulation to evaluate the packet delivery ratio (PDR) and the reduction ratio of the number of GWs. We confirm that the redundancy can be reduced by using the proposed methods without affecting the performance of the network topology.