Tunneling Smart Energy protocols over ZigBee

In the course of increasing the energy efficiency, simplifying processes and providing new customer services, millions of smart meters will be rolled out during the next few years. Wireless personal area network (WPAN) technologies play a major role in the deployment of such systems. The ZigBee Alliance noted the big potential lying beneath smart energy solutions and developed the Smart Energy profile, an application protocol that could take the role of the missing interoperable standard. However, electronic meters have been around for quite some time now and the industry has spent much effort on creating powerful and popular metering protocol standards such as DLMS/COSEM or IEC62056-21. A possible solution combining state of the art wireless mesh network technology and existing metering standards is to provide a mechanism to transport metering PDU over ZigBee. This paper elaborates the requirements of such an approach, proposes a design and discusses the results of a first implementation tunneling DLMS over ZigBee that can also be adapted to other domains.