Extending battery life of smart meters by optimizing communication subsystem

Smart metering with exploitation of communication technologies has revolutionized the efficient utilization and management of energy consumption. World over, tremendous research is going on energy efficient communication technologies and protocols. ZigBee is widely accepted protocol for low power and low data rate smart home area networks. In this paper, therefore for smart metering application, instead of devising a new protocol, we have critically examined the application interfacing methods of energy conservation like fixed and adaptive duty cycling, data reduction and transmitter power control as suggested and employed for wireless sensor networks. These methods have been evaluated on the basis of key objectives of smart metering that are real time information or minimum latency in data to user and interoperability among devices and manufacturers. A new approach called Adaptive sleep time and transmit power to minimize the energy consumption in smart metering home area network communication has also been proposed.