Hierarchical smart meter data hub initiative for enabling IoT based smart grid in Indonesia

Abstract

Although the internet has been penetrating Indonesia for more than 20 years, data connectivity remains one of the concerning issues especially in the energy sector. Energy meters, which are the main instruments to control energy retails at consumer's side, have been mostly replaced from analog to digital smart meters. However, the generated data have yet integrated to the headquarter due to the poor data transmission costing power companies' opportunities in terms of business evaluation and improvement or accurate decision makings or the benefit obstruction of a properly functioning monitoring and control system. This paper proposes a novel design of hierarchical smart meter data hub to bridge the digital gap in the distribution level of the energy domain based on internet of things (IoT) technology, reasonably applicable for current development in Indonesia. In addition to the data hub architecture proposed, the 3 applicable data transfer protocols to deal with the existing network telecommunication infrastructure characterized by limited bandwidth are additionally presented in a practical approach. As this data hub architecture is designed to work with various distributed data networks enabling smart meters to directly communicate for the power company, implementing this method is potentially expected to accelerate the implementation of IoT based smart grid in a certain level.