Hybrid AMI system model for Lahore and Karachi

Karachi and Lahore are the most populated cities of Pakistan having large number of energy consumers. With the increasing population growth, the number of energy consumers is also increasing rapidly. The existing metering system is manual, which is very unreliable in terms of data retrieval. The existing manual metering system is incapable of fulfilling the current and future demands (i.e., real time metering and monitoring, energy theft, automatic meter reading and reliable meter data retrieval). Advance metering infrastructure (AMI) is the alternate solution to meet the current demands and challenges of manual metering system. AMI system can be implemented by various methods depending on the communication techniques. In this paper we suggest the hybrid system model for Lahore and Karachi. AMI system consists of smart meter, gateway (i.e., data concentrator (DC)) and meter data management system (MDMS). We explain the physical layer format for the communication of radio frequency (RF) based smart meter to DC. We developed an algorithm, which enables communications of DC with smart meters. We successfully implemented the proposed system and provide simulation results to support our system model.