Abstract:
Smart meter infrastructure (which is also known as Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI)) is an integral part of the electricity Smart Grid architecture. The concept consists of advanced electronic meters that periodically record and relay the electrical energy consumed along with the time of the day of this consumption. This data provides the electricity retailers with the necessary critical information to introduce innovative pricing plans and thereby influence the electricity consumption pattern of the consumers which in-turn enables smart generation of power. Overall the power systems efficiency is improved which in turn increases the network benefits to all the stakeholders of the supply demand chain of electricity. Cellular networks are the popular infrastructure chosen for the deployment of the smart meters. Vodafone provides this infrastructure for the metering companies in New Zealand. To date 400,000 meters have been installed in New Zealand. The annual metering revenue from these meters alone amounts to 28.656 Million NZD. This is a large fee that can be avoided by exploring alternatives to the cellular networks. An ad-hoc network is one such alternative which organises participating nodes into a distributed and reconfigurable topology, requires no infrastructure and operates in the unlicensed bands of the spectrum. This thesis explores the feasibility of implementing smart meter infrastructure based on ad-hoc networks. NS2 was employed to simulate test scenarios and to study the effect of variation of minimum inter-meter spacing, meter densities, data rate and data packet size, along with the effect of network disturbance (i.e. the self-healing propensity of the network). Three ad-hoc network routing protocols: DSR, AODV and DSDV were assessed by comparing their performance metrics. Results that were obtained by employing Tx and Rx antenna gains equal to 1, suggested that it was feasible to deploy a smart meter system based on ad-hoc networks with a maximum separation distance of 250m from the data concentrator for suburban environments and up to 400m for flat terrain represented by two ray ground (TRG) and free space (Friis) propagation models. By employing antennas with higher gains and techniques such as spatial diversity the operational range and performance of the smart meter system can be expected to improve. It was observed that the on-demand protocols (DSR and AODV) outperformed the table driven protocol (DSDV) in terms of throughput and packet delivery ratio (PDR). In general, the end-to-end delay metric remained below 500ms for most of the parameter combinations. Environments characterised by a shadowing propagation model displayed the largest delays. The AODV protocol achieved the highest PDR. Based on the proposed concept of self-healing the DSDV protocol was once again outperformed by the DSR and the AODV protocols in terms of the end-to-end delay, throughput and packet delivery ratio. It is recommended that the smart meter infrastructure system planners employ on-demand protocols such as the DSR and AODV protocols for deployment of smart meter infrastructure based on ad-hoc networks.