Smart Meter over LoRaWAN

Conventional post-paid electricity meter requires field personnel to check the meter regularly to determine the customer’s energy usage. This requires much effort, costly, and prone to human error, particularly in a massive deployment with high number of subscribers. One solution to address this problem is by employing smart meter and Advanced Meter Infrastructure, which able to send usage data automatically. The emergence of DLMS standard has helped the wide scale adoption of Advance Meter Infrastructure. The layered approach of DLMS allows meter manufacturers and utility providers to use any connectivity deemed suitable for their needs. LoRaWAN has emerged as one of the connectivity that can be used. With its long range, low power and relatively low cost, LoRaWAN is suitable for DLMS meter. Nevertheless, the low power and low bandwith nature of LoRaWAN come with payload constraint in LoRa which limits the amount of data that can be sent. This paper proposes a retrofit solution for older DLMS smart meter devices that do not natively support LoRa connectivity. Our modem design solves the low payload problem in LoRa, while still delivering the most critical parameters and providing controls to the electricity providers. In the small-scale test, the delivery success rate is 98.9% without employing redundancy measure.