Improving the performance of mobile data collecting systems for electricity meter reading using Wireless Sensor Network

Nowadays, Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) systems have been studied and largely exploited in many developed countries, using different communication techniques such as PLC, Wi-Fi, Telephone Line, etc. However, recent researches have shown that collecting data using Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is the future technology for AMR system. In fact, researchers have implemented the technique gathering data using WSN. Nevertheless, this kind of network has different characteristics compared with the traditional WSN. This work proposes the metering network topology corresponding to the household distribution in most of developing countries. Then, it presents the data collection method for this topology and points out the essential of Mobile Data Collector (MDC) for this network. Finally, it shows the effect of MDC speed on the reliability of electricity data collection using NS2 simulation. The simulation results indicate that the proposed data collection method has an improvement over the traditional MDC data collection using ZigBee wireless devices.