Making a SMART choice

“Choosing the right technology is going to ensure long-term success of smart metering projects,” avers Shiv Kaushik, Country Manager, Cyan Technologies
 Smart cities are coming to India. During his recent trip to Japan, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a tie-up between the cities of Varanasi and Kyoto, with the objective of turning Varanasi into a smart city. Of course, the new central government of India has spoken time and again about its intentions to transform Indian cities into smart cities, as well as developing 100 new ones.
Research firm Forrester defines a smart city as “the use of smart computing technologies to make the critical infrastructure components and services of a city – including city administration, education, healthcare, public safety, real estate, transportation and utilities – more intelligent, interconnected and efficient.” Utilities that make use of smart meters are a critical building block of smart cities. A smart meter is one that is connected to the utility’s computers through a data communication network – allowing both utilities as well as customers to regularly monitor their consumption.
Smart metering or Automatic Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is not new to India; there are many pilot projects already running in many utilities that are successfully demonstrating the benefits. In the last few months, Essel Utilities and Tata Power have even announced commercial deployment of smart metering solutions in locations as diverse as Bihar’s Muzaffarpur and Maharashtra’s Nagpur, as well as Mumbai. More utilities are expected to announce roll out plans of their own as they realise the enormous benefits, financial and otherwise, of migrating to smart metering; the least of which is enhanced quality of service for all customers.
An advantage of using smart metering technology is that utilities do not require access to each meter individually to record the readings. The accurate meter data can be gathered remotely by simply walking through the neighbourhoods with a hand held meter reading device, or aggregated through centrally located data concentrator units. This helps the utilities reduce their labour cost. Additionally, error detection and correction using a smart metering system is also easier and less expensive and reduces the chance of local fraud.
As utilities prepare for smart metering adoption, the choice of underlying communications technology is a major strategic decision that requires careful consideration. Cost, security, regulatory compliance, standards compliance, transmission range and power consumption are just some of the important factors which need to be considered while choosing the right communication technology for a smart meter.
At present, utilities can choose from Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Power Line Communication (PLC), GPRS (cellular) and sub-GHz wireless as smart metering communication technologies. While Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, GPRS and sub-GHz are all based on wireless communications, PLC is a wired technology. When it comes to choosing between wired and wireless communication networks for a smart meter, the latter is no doubt the intelligent choice.
When compared to the smart meters using PLC, the wireless enabled meters are simple to install and easy to commission. While PLC requires a structured infrastructure to be already in place to work, there is no need for expensive cabling and associated wireline infrastructure in case of wireless communication networks. PLC also has the disadvantage that it weakens the signal frequency due to conductor material properties of the cable, branching, echo and interference due to multipath propagation. 
Among the wireless communications, while Wi-Fi and sub-GHz transmit signals over a longer field range, Bluetooth and ZigBee transmissions have a shorter range. Wi-Fi is often a great choice when a large volume of data needs to be transferred (over Internet, LAN or WAN for example), but using it for low volume data transfer (as is required in smart metering applications) is inefficient and costly. Bluetooth on the other hand is only suited for very short range (~10 metres) applications. Implementing GPRS on a per meter basis is very expensive. To operate at the optimal level, smart meters need to send relatively small amounts of data to longer ranges at regular intervals. Thus we are left with ZigBee and sub-GHz as the two viable choices.

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