Upgrading of traditional electric meter into wireless electric meter using ZigBee technology

Abstract

Since the electric generating, distributing and marketing has been possible; the Electric Meter was introduced and developed along the years, but never like this time. The digital technology, the wireless communication, and the computer systems have dramatically changed the Electric meter generation from Traditional Meter to Automatic Meter and now to Smart Meter. Their differences lie in how to collect and process information, and the amount of information they can provide. Even so the traditional meter reading has been long used, and it is still one of the most common ways for meter reading. This method, however, has their disadvantages which are the result of human basis reading method that uses. If the reading problem is solved by adding a simple circuit, which makes it automatic it will be still useful method of reading. In this paper it is described a prototype for Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) system that uses a Traditional meter, ZigBee modules, and Mesh network. As result the system gives, full capability of automatic meter even some features of smart meter too. This experiment has an important result for developing country like Ethiopia, which almost 99% its meters are the Traditional meters. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.