The Generic Design of a High-Traffic Advanced Metering Infrastructure Using ZigBee

A multi-interface ZigBee building area network (MIZBAN) for a high-traffic advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) for high-rise buildings was developed. This supports meter management functions such as Demand Response for smart grid applications. To cater for the high-traffic communication in these building area networks (BANs), a multi-interface management framework was defined and designed to coordinate the operation between multiple interfaces based on a newly defined tree-based mesh (T-Mesh) ZigBee topology, which supports both mesh and tree routing in a single network. To evaluate MIZBAN, an experiment was set up in a five-floor building. Based on the measured data, simulations were performed to extend the analysis to a 23-floor building. These revealed that MIZBAN yields an improvement in application-layer latency of the backbone and the floor network by 75% and 67%, respectively. This paper provides the design engineer with seven recommendations for a generic MIZBAN design, which will fulfill the requirement for demand response by the U.S. government, i.e. a latency of less than 0.25 s.