Fog-compute capable smart metering infrastructure

We present an open-source fog-computing architecture for LoRaWAN®-based smart grid advanced metering infrastructure. The presented device is designed to monitor and measure local consumer power demand and perform real-time load-shedding decisions at the network edge. The presented metering device measures the $I_{RMS},\ V_{RMS}$, apparent, reactive, and active power of an attached load and transmits these measurements to a LoRaWAN® Gateway and then an application server using the MQTT protocol. The fog-computing architecture is designed to locally predict the time and distance between generations of outages during a cascading power outage. Cascading power outages can inflict devastating consequences on the economic and operational security of city infrastructure, and can even result in fatalities. Should a localized failure occur, the fog network reacts to mitigate failure propagation by shedding load in a structured way to reduce consumer loss by powering off load in priority order. The proposed fog-computing architecture will benefit Smart Cities by providing a means by which energy companies can selectively shed power at the edge of a grid by powering off customer appliances in order of increasing criticality, thereby mitigating the propagation of a failure and reducing consumer costs that result from power loss. Our micro-controller code and PCB board design files have been made publicly available in GitHub for the community to use as a reference architecture.