BONAM VENKATA CHALAMAYYAINSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY & SCIENCE

TITLE: AUTOMATIC POWER METER READING SYSTEM USING GSM

NETWORK

By

B.VENKATA PAVAN SRIKANTH Regd No : 08H41A0411

Under the Guidance ofMr. S.TATA RAO , B.Tech

Abstract

The development of a GSM Power Meter Reading and Distribution Control

(GPMDC) System is presented in this paper. The GPMDC System is made up of

multiple GSM Power Meters and an Electricity eBilling Information System.

The GSM Power Meter is the integration of a single phase Class 1, IEC61036

standard compliance digital kWh power meter, Power to Communication (P2C)

Interface system and a GSM modem which utilize the GSM network to send the power

usage reading back to the energy provider wirelessly. The message consists of 6 digits

kWh power usage reading together with the user identification number. At the energy

provider side an Electricity eBilling system is use to manage all SMS meter reading,

compute the billing cost, update the database, and SMS the billing statement back to its

respective user for payment notification.

The GPMDC also feature distribution control system to cut off power supply of

consumer who did not made payment after a due date through GSM network. The

GPMDC system provides effective and efficient power meter reading, billing

notification and distribution control through the use of ICT and GSM network.

INDEX

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 2: SYSTEM OVERVIEWS

CHAPTER 3: GSM POWER METER DESIGN

CHAPTER4: SYSTEM DEMONSTRATION

CHAPTER5: CONCLUSION

CHAPTER6: REFERENCES

1. Introduction:

Since the first Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network

started to commission and operation in 1991, the world has adopted the standard for

mobile communication. After the adoption, countries around the world are developing

GSM infrastructure for wider nation wide coverage at a rapid rate. The SMS was

developed as part of the Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) phase2

specification in 1992 as a text paging mechanism in addition to the original GSM voice

service. It experienced an astronomical increase usage making it as a popular

communication means for notification.

The SMS has extended their service to content providers to deliver a wide

variety of services to mobile phone users. SMS is one of the convenient mean of

communication especially for reminder, notification, and a short note when the mobile

phone user is not expect to answer or respond immediately. With the advancement and

booming of ICT and internet technology makes online information system applications

such as e-commerce are gaining more acceptances by the public. The convergence of

GSM and ICT network allow more mobile and wireless applications to be implemented

such as electricity meter reading, billing, payment and distribution control.

Now a days Current electricity billing is done by labor and manual reading from

houses to houses. This requires huge number of labor operators and long working hour

to achieve complete area billing. Human operator billing are prone to reading error as

sometime the houses power meter is place in a location which is hard to read with

naked eyes. Labor billing job is sometime restricted and slow down by bad weather

condition. The printed billing has the tendency of missing in the mail box. Various

Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) systems using Power Line Carrier (PLC)

communications , Bluetooth and ZigBee were developed to address the above mention

problems, but the above mentioned AMR are either short in operating distant and still

require some intervention of human operators or prone to error and reliability issue due

to noise and poor power quality in the transmission line, more importantly the above

mentioned method does not allow distribution control. With the rapid development of

Global System Mobile (GSM) infrastructure and Information Communication

Technology (ICT) in the past two decades has made wireless automatic meter reading

system more reliable and possible.

The GSM Power Meter Reading and Distribution Control (GPMDC) System

presented in this paper takes advantage of the available GSM infrastructure nationwide

coverage in the country and the Short Messaging System (SMS) cell broadcasting

feature to request and retrieve individual houses and building power consumption meter

reading back to the energy provider wirelessly. The store and forwarding features of

2. System Overviews:

The complete system overview of GPMDC system is shown in Figure 1.

The complete system is made up of multiple GSM power meters installed in

the city, SMS gateway, Application Terminal, Database Server, Email Server, Printer

and Web server. The GSM power meter is working in conjunction with the GSM

network to retrieve power meter reading. The GSM power meter is a single phase

digital kWh power meter which utilizes the GSM network to send the power usage

reading back to the energy provider wirelessly upon request from the energy provider

SMS gateway. The GSM Power Meter is the integration of a single phase Class 1,

IEC61036 standard compliance digital kWh power meter and a GSM modem. A SIM

card with a unique special service number is require for the GSM power meter to

receive and to reply its meter reading to the energy provider using SMS. The special

service number SIM card is working similarly with mobile phone number except it is

not meant for voice service. The SIM card service number is also use to identify and

retrieve the owner or customer details from the database server for billing purposes.

On the ICT side the eBIS application software was installed in the application

terminal where the energy provider operator uses to perform meter reading routine in

the monthly interval through the GSM network. Upon meter reading execution the SMS

gateway performs cell board casting of request SMS to all GSM power meter to request

for their meter reading. Once each individual GSM power meter received the request

SMS from the energy provider SMS gateway, they will immediately response by

composing its reading in six digits kWh unit and reply to the energy provider SMS

gateway by SMS. All the received SMSes will be stored in the SMS gateway. The

retrieval of individual meter through GSMSMS for the whole country may take

sometime depends on the network traffic and weather condition for the particular GSM

base transceiver station. Upon completion within a given period of time, the eBIS will

start to sort the received SMS according to the post code area based on the GSM power

meter number. From the sorted list it also look for any non reply GSM power meter due

to SMS data packet loss and complied a list for second request. After second request is

executed and if there is still no reply, a field engineer will be sent to carryout field

inspection on the particular faulty GSM meter to rectify the problem. After the

completion of the meter reading request the application terminal will starts to retrieve

the meter reading from the SMS gateway and to store and update to the database server

accordingly. From the database eBIS will starts to calculate the billing amount for an

individual meter base on the tariff rate from the energy provider. The billing

notifications are send to an individual owner through Email by the Email Server, SMS

to the owner through SMS gateway and hard copy printing through the Print Server for

postal mail for owner who prefer hard copy bill. A Web portal is setup at the Web

server to provide easy checking and pay online services. Once the owner received the

billing notification from SMS, Email or hard copy printing bill, the owner can access

the web portal and logon to check their billing detail since the web server is linked to

the database server. The owner can choose to pay their bill online using credit card as

the web server is connected to the e-commerce server that handles any banking

transaction. The owner can choose to pay their bill by cash at any of the energy provide

outlet that have access to the eBIS application terminal. The owner can use their mobile

phone as well to retrieve their own GSM power meter reading verification. This can be

achieved by just sending a check SMS to the owner GSM power meter number. Once

the GSM power meter receive the SMS it will then compose the current meter reading

and reply to the owner using SMS. With this the owner can also monitor their power

usage anytime and anywhere. In the event if the consumer fail to make payment after

the payment date, the eBIS will send a power cut SMS to the particular GSM power

meter to cut off the power supply to the consumer at the same time also notified the

consumer through SMS that their power supply has been cut off due to no payment.

Once payment has been made, the eBIS will send a power restore SMS to the particular

GSM power meter to restore power supply to the consumer.

3. GSM Power Meter Design:

The design of the GSM Power Meter is an integration of a single phase Class1,

IEC61036 standard compliance digital kWh power meter, Power to Communication

(P2C) Interface board, Distribution Control Board and a GSM modem as shown in

Figure 2.

The digital power meter is used to measure the power consumption drawn from

the energy provider sub station to the consumer in kWh unit. A Single Phase digital

Watt Hour Meter ATec12 from ATec was chosen for GSM Power Meter

implementation. The digital power meter was set to display six digits with one decimal

point reading in kWh unit and a meter constant of 800 impulse per kWh. The digital

power meter has an optocouple meant to couple the impulse count to any external

electronic circuitry without direct contact to the digital power metering circuitry. The

Power to Communication (P2C) interface board is used to interface the impulse and

synchronize count from the power meter optocouple circuit and to store the meter

reading into its internal non-volatile EEPROM memory at every single impulse count

interval. In the event of power failure the last meter reading information will be stored

in the EEPROM. Upon power restoration the power microcontroller will retrieve the

last meter reading and to continuous sync with the digital power meter. GSM modem

SIM-T03 from SIMCOM was chosen to use in the prototype implementation. The GSM

modem used a RS232 serial communication protocol and AT command to

communicate to the power meter. During normal operation the P2C interface board

synchronizes the impulse count and wait for any SMS request from either the energy

provider or the consumer. Once a request SMS is receive from the GSM modem, the

P2C interface board retrieve the last meter reading from the EEPROM memory. After

obtaining the meter reading it compose the meter reading in standard short message

format and reply back to the sender or energy provider. Figure 3 shows the meter

reading by the consumer using mobile phone SMS.

The distribution control board is use to cut off or to restore the supply to the

consumer. The distribution control board is control by the P2C interface board. Once

the GSM modem received a power cut SMS from the energy provider, the P2C

interface board will send a signal to the distribution control board to trigger the relay to

cut off the power. On the other hand the P2C interface board can also send a signal to

distribution control board to restore the power once a power restore SMS is received

from the energy provider. The GSM Power Meter prototype is shown in Figure 4.

The P2C interface board is embedded inside the power meter with RS232 serial

interface that is linked to the GSM modem mounted on the right hand side of the power

meter. The distribution control board was mounted at the back of the GSM power

meter.

4. System Demonstration

For demonstration purpose a 1000W load was utilized. The load used is light

bulbs and the load is connected at all time as shown in Figure 5.

For demonstration the GSM power meter and SMS Gateway uses normal SIM

card phone number. The eBIS was entirely developed in a computer system. The eBIS

application software was developed and implement by using Microsoft Visual Basic

6.0. The database was developed by using SQL. The Web Portal was developed by

Microsoft FrontPage. Figure 6 shows the eBIS application software GUI that displayed

the customer information and total bill after requesting, retrieving and calculating the

meter reading into the system.

The billing notification to customer send by SMS, Email and hardcopy printing

for postal is shown in Figure 7. All the notifications are generated by the eBIS system

and customer information is retrieve from the database.

Once the customer received the billing notification then they can check and

made payment online through the web portal. Figure 8 show the customer detail and

billing information after login into the web portal. The customer can click on the pay

online button to pay the bill using the credit card.

Once clicked on the pay online button, the pay online page is display as shown

in Figure 9 which allows the customer to key in the credit card details for banking

transaction.

In the event if the consumer fail to make payment after the payment date, the

eBIS allow the operator to send a power cut off SMS to the particular GSM power

meter to cut off the power supply and at the same time notify the consumer through

SMS that their power supply has been cut off due to no payment. This is done by click

on the Cut button, login with password and key in the GSM power meter SIM card

contact number on the eBIS application software user interface as shown in Figure 10.

Once payment has been made, power restoration is done by the same procedure

through the eBIS application software user interface. Figure 11 shows the power cut off

and power restore SMS notifications

The complete demonstration of GPMDC from meter reading, notification,

payment, distribution control of power cut off and power restoration are presented in

this paper. The GSM power meter prototype is bulky in size due to the size of the GSM

modem and distribution control board relay. This is because the digital power meter

and GSM modem is from off the shelf product. To integrate everything inside a single

digital power meter, a custom design digital power meter, GSM modem and casing is

require, so that the GSM modem and distribution control relay can be embedded inside

the meter. On the ICT side the eBIS is solely developed for demonstration purpose and

still have the following limitation in term of the accounting system, cash payment

system and real banking credit card transaction is yet implemented and also it does not

have batch processing and sorting feature to deal to large number of power meter

reading. These limitations can be easily overcome with a group of software

development teams with various expertises in the area of network administration,

accounting, banking and batch processing to implement the complete eBIS system.

5. Conclusion:

The design and development of GSM Power Meter to demonstrate the concept

of wireless power metering, eBilling and distribution control using ICT and GSM

network technology has been proven viable. With the development and implementation

of eBIS and GSM power meter together with the utilization of available ICT and GSM

network infrastructure in the country it provide efficient wireless automatic meter

reading, distribution control and making fast billing system, accurate, effective and

reduction of labor cost of operation.

6. References:

“Overview of The GSM System and Protocol Architecture”,

IEEE Communication Magazine.

“The Global System for Mobile Communications Short Message Service”,

IEEE Personal Communications.

www.wikipedia.com

www.tcil-india.com

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