Effective Metering Data Aggregation for Smart Grid Communication Infrastructure

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) systems have been developed to perform automated meter reading, reduce peak loads, and use energy efficiently. Two issues exist regarding this system. The first issue is the communication and handling of consumer data concerning electricity collected by power utilities. The second issue is the management of communication network resources and scheduling of metering to avoid congestions and communication errors. The major device for addressing these two issues is a concentrator that acts as a data relay point in an AMI system. The concentrator collects data from the meter and sends them through communication networks. This study discusses the aggregation methods of the concentrator with respect to the aforementioned two issues and proposes a method to reduce network utilization and message size on a server. The method concatenates small smart metering messages sent from relevant meters. The traditional method aggregates and concatenates messages without numerical processing. The proposed method processes messages at the concentrator to reduce total message size and calculation cost on the server. Moreover, the method that combines the traditional and proposed methods was evaluated by considering a real-world case. These methods were simulated by using an ns-3 network simulator to evaluate their efficiency in sending messages concerning the volume of power consumption to the server. The results of the simulations show that the proposed methods reduce message size by as much as 98.5% in some cases and, by means of the concentrator, shorten the communication time between meters and the server. The proposed method can help to reduce loads on networks and servers.