Bandwidth analysis of smart meter network infrastructure

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is a network infrastructure in Smart Grid, which links electricity customers to utility company. Compared to a network where different amount of data is send, AMI network sends small amount of data at different time intervals. This network enables smart services by making it possible for the utility company to get an overview of their customers power consumption and also control devices in their costumers household e.g. heat pumps. The problem investigated in this paper is what bandwidth requirements can be expected when implementing such network to utilize smart meters and which existing broadband network technologies can facilitate this smart meter service. Initially, scenarios for smart meter infrastructure are identified. The paper defines abstraction models which cover the AMI scenarios. A general overview of the bandwidth requirements are analysed. For this analysis assumptions and limitations are defined. The results show the bandwidth provided by GPRS technology is sufficient. However, from a delay point of view, GPRS has its limits, therefore, xDSL or 3G can be used for faster transfer but will rarely utilize the available bandwidth from these technologies. The aggregator which is responsible to collect all the data from the different smart meters can become a bottleneck as the aggregated amount of data is high, thus the bandwidth for the data concentrator has to be high. These results are interesting to look at, as they show there are different bandwidth requirements from a smart meter and aggregator point of view and that, the aggregator is a vital element in the network and it has to be studied further.