Bandwidth Analysis of Smart Meter Network Infrastructure

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is a net-work infrastructure in Smart Grid, which links the electricity customers to the utility company. This network enables smart services by making it possible for the utility company to get an overview of their customers power consumption and also control devices in their costumers household e.g. heat pumps. With these smart services, utility companies can do load balancing on the grid by shifting load using resources the customers have. The problem investigated in this paper is what bandwidth require-ments can be expected when implementing such network to utilize smart meters and which existing broadband network technologies can facilitate this smart meter service. Initially, scenarios for smart meter infrastructure are identified. The paper defines abstraction models which cover the AMI scenarios. When the scenario has been identified a general overview of the bandwidth requirements are analysed. For this analysis the assumptions and limitations are defined. The results obtained by the analysis show, that the amount of data collected and transferred by a smart meter is very low compared to the available bandwidth of most internet connections. The results show the bandwidth provided by GPRS technology is sufficient. However, from a delay point of view, GPRS has its limits, therefore, xDSL or 3G can be used for faster transfer but will rarely utilize the available bandwidth from these technologies. The aggregator or concentrator which is responsible to collect all the data from the different smart meters can become a bottleneck as the aggregated amount of data is high, thus the bandwidth for the data concentrator has to be high. These results are interesting to look at as it is a common misunderstanding that smart grid service requires high bandwidth.