ETTC'2003 - SEE

ETCC'2003 European Test and Telemetry Conference
utilities within one geographic area, gas and electric brokerage services, health and safety
alarm monitoring and other transaction-based services.
The choice of communication channels and techniques is very important and a difficult task for
the utility:
• the communication network must be capable at least of two-way communication between
load management devices and meters
• the network must (or should) be owned and controlled by the utility
• installation and maintenance of the network must be simple
• the network must provide barriers to un-authorized access
• the network must be expandable in the future
• the network must be part of a total solution
• the network must perform additional customer services
Beside that, the price pressure on a system solution and a seek for a second source
manufacturing, is very high.
2. Structure of AMR system
AMR system, based on RF ISM communication, can be seen on figure 1. Electricity meters,
either old inductive ones or electronic ones, are located on the household premise. The meters
can be connected by a local data concentrators, equipped with RF modem, that forms a fixed
data network, or with a walk-by method with RF equipped hand terminal unit.
figure 1 Architecture of AMR system, based on RF communication
The first example is old inductive meter (i.e. Ferraris type) that is widely used globally. This
device can be upgraded by optical sensor that sense rotation of meter’s disk and transforms
rotation to output pulses. Pulses are processed and memorized in data communicator that is