A Smart Meter Infrastructure for Smart Grid IoT Applications

Electric infrastructures have been pushed forward to handle tasks they were not originally designed to perform. To improve reliability and efficiency, state-of-the-art power grids include improved security, reduced peak loads, increased integration of renewable sources, and lower operational costs. In this framework, “smart grids” are built around bidirectional communication technologies, where “smart meters” communicate with all other entities and collect data from the power grid, offering specific features to each actor playing in the energy marketplace. In this article, to overcome some of the challenges raised by smart grids and smart meters, we propose a distributed metering infrastructure, which provides bidirectional communication, self-configuration, and autoupdate capabilities. Our 3-phase smart meters follow the basics Internet of Things principles and have the ability to run, either onboard or distributed on the network, multiple algorithms for smart grid management. These algorithms can be freely added, updated, or removed on the fly, thanks to the autoupdate feature of the system. Moreover, to reduce costs and improve scalability, we prove that it is possible to implement our smart meters using only off-the-shelf and inexpensive hardware devices. A digital real-time simulator (i.e., Opal-RT) has been used to assess the capabilities of both the infrastructure and the meter. Our experimental analysis shows that the latency introduced by the data transmission over the Internet is compliant with the limits imposed by the IEC 61850 standard. As a consequence, our architecture does not affect the operational status of the smart grid, making it a viable solution to support the deployment of novel services.