Wireless Mesh Network for Remote Monitoring of Electric Power Meters at a University Campus

In the year 2012, as a way to determine in what way energy was used, the University of El Salvador installed 30 electricity meters. All meters came from the same manufacturer. They were in 3 different models, with different characteristics. Just 11 of them had memory, to save data for several weeks. All of them were installed up in the very poles that support substation's transformers. At first, It was thought that data could be collected periodically directly from the meters. But that idea proved to be hard to implemented. That idea required to expose personnel to the proximity of each substation, which are hanging up in poles. As an alternative, each meter was connected to a low cost WiFi router. Each router was set as a node of a mesh network. This topology gave the network enough redundancy to start working but still had some issues to solve. Radio links were weak, several times connection among router wasn't there, packages were lost and data wasn't save. Through the years several changes have been adapted. Network robustness has improved. Radio links still are unreliable but data transfer has improved a lot. A new interrogation architecture has been developed. Data is read and saved at the router and transfer to a server. An index keeps track of every new data successfully saved in the server.