Smart meter standardisation as a market enabler and flexible information demands

The increasing complexity of energy networks architecture, due to more distributed energy generation and to energy market liberalization, require new policies for management and optimisation of networkparameter and enable the development of new features and applications for the end user. The introduction of smart grids to handle the new distributed generation paradigm can effectively benefit from the adoption of smart metering devices at the customer premises. The main issues required for a smart meter are related both to controlling and reading functionalities. Control functionalities are typically managed by the energy operator, whereas reading functionalities can be of interest both to the operator, for instance for billing information, and to the end-user, as a “smart” energy consumption can be one of the major fallout of these new metering capabilities. In this scenario the communications strategies developed for energy smart metering can be applied to other remote sensing and management applications, such as water and gas smart metering, waste management or public lighting monitoring and control, designing a Metropolitan Mesh Machine Network (M3N), where different machine to machine devices are connected and provide suitable low cost, low power connectivity. M3N are self-organized network and allows new aggregations of nodes, multi hop transmissions and flexible connectivity among smart metering nodes. In this work we focus our attention on the identification of suitable wireless communication systems to be used for the development of the M3N, enabling the interconnection between smart metering nodes and the transmission of consumption or other data to the meter operator database through the broadband fixed network. In this paper Short Range Device (SRD) and WiFi systems are investigated to assess if, in different scenarios, their specific system characteristics such as transmitted power, and access mechanism as well as employed frequency band are adequate for Smart Meter applications. Considering that the huge majority of the endpoints are located below ground (e.g. water pit) the paper investigates influence of propagation phenomena on network performance, in terms of system throughput. It is also investigated the key role of electromagnetic field propagation to provide guidelines for the design, deployment and operation of M3N networks.