Development of a smart power meter for AMI based on ZigBee communication

Many governments deploy ubiquitous IT project, which aims to combine the latest wireless network and wide-band technologies etc. to accomplish a ubiquitous wireless communication network. The ubiquitous wireless communication network can be utilized for the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Therefore, this paper tries to use the new wireless communication technologies to design and implement a ZigBee-based smart power meter. An outage recording system is also designed and embedded into the smart meter. The microcontroller of Microchip dsPIC30F series is used to develop the proposed smart power meter. A ZigBee system is then deigned and integrated into the proposed power meter, and used to transmit the detailed power consumption data and outage event data to rear-end processing system. The proposed smart power meter cannot only be used for power consumption data collection but also for outage event data recording. The proposed system has great potential to be used to build the area-based AMI. Experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed system. Besides, the application of ZigBee communication in power area may, expectedly, lead to make a definite contribution to ubiquitous IT project.