Background
A state utility company in India had installed around 20 lakh ZigBee based smart meters in order to automate the fetching of meter data in real time, and to get alerts for tamper and theft. However the ZigBee meters could not be automated and hence required a dedicated person with an electronic Hand Held Unit to go and fetch the data manually.
Problem statement
The state utility company wanted to automate the process of fetching meter data from all of these pre-installed meters. The requirement was for 5000 of such meters.
Deployed solution
The deployed solution was a hybrid mix of ZigBee, proprietary Sub1 protocol (SmarttMesh) and WiMAX.
How the solution is innovative
As mentioned earlier the solution works as a retrofit solution for pre-installed smart meters. The components of the solution are:
ZigBee meters
These meters were pre-installed by the state utility company. Enabled with the ZigBee protocol, these meters needed a Hand Held Unit to fetch data. Maven’s solution was able to work with these meters without needing any change to the meter hardware, firmware or communication protocol.
Hybrid gateways
These gateways were specially designed and developed by Maven. They worked on two protocols, the ZigBee and the SmarttMesh protocol. They would convert requests and responses received from one protocol into the other. More specifically, they would receive meter data fetch request from the Data Concentrator Unit via SmarttMesh protocol. They would convert the request to ZigBee and forward it to the meters. Responses received from the meters would be ZigBee messages, that would be converted to SmarttMesh messages, and forwarded to the DCU.
Data Concentrator Units (DCUs)
The DCU works on the SmarttMesh protocol and a WiMAX connection backbone. The DCU sends request to either individual meters or to a group of meters, in order to collect their data. The DCU is connected to a mesh of hybrid gateways. Meters reading collected from the gateways are uploaded to the Internet, using the WiMAX connection.
How the solution is disruptive
The uniqueness of the application lies in the hybrid gateways developed by Maven. Most of the solutions available in market cannot be integrated with third party devices or protocols. Neither can most of the solutions be customized to suit the needs of clients. Maven’s solution was integrated with the ZigBee protocol which is one of the most popular mesh networking protocol.
Also the data collected by the DCU is immediately uploaded to the Meter Data Management Software. The software is used by supervisors to identify faulty meters in real time. The software also allows for tamper and theft detection. Integration with Google maps has helped to pinpoint the geographical location of the meters, and gateways. It also helps to understand the network, especially which meters are connected to which gateways and their signal strength.
Deployment snapshots
Future direction
The solution is perfectly aligned with the Smart City and Smart Grid initiatives that have been launched in India. Over the next ten years, more than 130 million smart meters will be installed in India, and a lot of existing meters will be upgraded to smart meters. Such smart meters help in making informed policies regarding demand forecasting, dynamic tariffs, and load management.
About the author
Devavrat Kulkarni is a Senior Business Analyst at Maven Systems Pvt. Ltd. Maven Systems Pvt. Ltd. is Pune based end-to-end product development company working in the M2M / IoT field. Maven’s area of expertise is wireless communication for a wide spectrum of domains. Maven has developed products for smart lighting, smart metering, medical wearables, industrial and home automation, asset monitoring and heavy equipment remote monitoring. Maven has won several awards from NASSCOM, Red Herring, Texas Instruments, Vodafone and so on. With clients in 20 different countries, Maven has a global reach.
