Data collecting from smart meters in an Advanced Metering Infrastructure

The classical solution for collecting data from energy meters, based on displacements of peoples, tends to be replaced by modern solutions: drive-by and Automated Meter Reading (AMR). AMR means to automatically collect data from meters and send them to a central computer. An Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is an AMR infrastructure with bidirectional smart meters - gateway communication, this leading to extra facilities. This paper describes an AMI based system. Smart meters are connected to a gateway through power lines and the gateway communicates with a central computer through GSM. The power line communication is implemented with an industrial bus, LonWork. The paper focuses the data collection solution.