Communication System Design for an Advanced Metering Infrastructure

This paper demonstrates a case study on the design of an Information and Control Technology (ICT) network for an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) on the IEEE 34 node radial distribution network. The AMI application is comprised of 330 smart meters deployed in the low voltage system of the feeder and 33 data concentrators in the medium voltage system. A power line carrier (PLC) communication design was developed and simulated in Network Simulator 3 (NS-3). The result was validated by comparing the communication network performance with the minimum requirements from the IEC Std. 61968. The average global end-to-end delay is 216 ms and the maximum delay is 459 ms. All the measurement delays and the availability are according to the IEC Std. 61968.