Design and Implementation of Wireless Sensor Network and Protocol for Smart Energy Meter

In this paper, the authors design and implement a wireless sensor network and protocol for smart energy meter applications. The system consists of a digital energy meter, a ZigBee coordinator and a management program. A ZigBee module from Atmel was adopted as a communication unit. The designed system is capable of automatically reading the unit and sending a terminal and a cover alarm to the management program. The system can support up to 100 energy meters, 10-hop network depth and automatically detect a new energy meter. The experimental results show that the system proposed in this paper is feasible to implemented in practical applications for automatic meter reading.