Communication Performance Assessment for Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Abstract

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), the foundation of smart grids, can be used to provide numerous intelligent power applications and services based on the data acquired from AMI. Effective and efficient communication performance between widely-spread smart meters and Data Concentrator Units (DCUs) is one of the most important issues for the successful deployment and operation of AMI and needs to be further investigated. This paper proposes an effective Communication Performance Index (CPI) to assess and supervise the communication performance of each smart meter. Some communication quality measurements that can be easily acquired from a smart meter such as reading success rate and response time are used to design the proposed CPI. Fuzzy logic is adopted to combine these measurements to calculate the proposed CPI. The CPIs for communication paths, DCUs and whole AMI can then be derived from meter CPIs. Simulation and experimental results for small-scale AMIs demonstrate the validity of the proposed CPI. Through the calculated CPIs, the communication performance and stability for AMI can be effectively assessed and supervised.

Keywords

• Advanced Metering Infrastructure
• Data Concentrator Unit
• Communication Performance Index
• reading success rate
• response time