Remote Gas Meter Reading System Based on Zigbee Networks

Recently, intelligent home instruments developed fast and have been deployed widely while a crucial problem of how dealing the left devices and properties come up to the top of the water. This paper presents a remote gas meter reading system based on multimedia Zigbee networks and digital image recognition technologies to alleviate difficulties existing in traditional gas meter reading work while keeping existing gas meters unchanged. In the system, sensor nodes take picture of gas meter by a CMOS camera and send it to the sink node over multi-Zigbee-hop in a residential quarter. Then the gas providing company can access gas meter pictures through the Internet and recognize the data automatically by computer vision technology. Making up the gap between the high bandwidth consuming, high reliable requiring picture transport and the bandwidth constrained, error-prone Zigbee networks, this paper also proposes an opportunistic routing with network coding method to improve end-to-end throughput of the whole network.