Architecture and traffic modelling of a utility metering wireless sensor network

In this paper we present a remote utility metering system based on ZigBee used to collect data from residential electricity, gas and water meters. In order to reduce the use of network resources and to evaluate the sensor network performance, a simulation study was carried out with two types of data related to electronic and non electronic metering devices. The study was conducted using a simulator which was developed using the OMNeT++ platform. The results show that for some application scenarios ZigBee is a valid technological solution to the remote utility metering problem.