A. Vezzoli

The sense of time in Open Metering System

Nowadays, the energy management is a critical task for suppliers and network operators. A wide use of smart meters may improve the quality of service provided by suppliers thanks to the distributed measuring and controlling capabilities. Recently, the smart metering covers not only electrical distribution, but also other commodities such as gas, water and heat. The German standard OMS (Open Metering System) aims to connect in the infrastructure all the different meters belonging to the same system. In the paper, the advantages of the smart meters are examined and the architecture of OMS network is briefly described. The time requirements of typical meter applications are not strict. However, the estimation of the quality of local power network in a building would require a more accurate acquisition system, in which the time of the meters is synchronized below the millisecond. A characterization of the drift between the clocks of two M-bus meters is required to identify the main limits of the native OMS synchronization mechanism. The relative drift is 8 ppm, which means after 24 hours their time references could differ of 0.7 s.

Evaluation of Bluetooth Hands-Free profile for sensors applications in smartphone platforms

Nowadays, the wide diffusion of smartphones has completely changed the interaction of people with the surroundings. In fact these devices are equipped with a large number of sensors, like GPS receiver, 3-axis accelerator, which can enrich the user experience, collecting data from the external environment. Moreover, additional sensors can be used to enlarge the set of data providing information usually not available in a smartphone, like biomedical data. Usually, Bluetooth is used to connect external sensors to smartphone. Several commercial solutions are already available on the market. Unfortunately, different types of smartphone require the use of dedicated external sensors, due to the different Bluetooth data profile supported by the different Operative System (iOS, Android). In this paper the Bluetooth Hands-Free profile has been evaluated to transmit sensor information to smartphone, since it is the only profile supported both by Android as well as iOS devices. A prototype of a photoplethysmographic sensor with Hands-Free interface has been realized and interfaced to commercial smartphone, showing the feasibility of this approach.

Smart meters as part of a sensor network for monitoring the low voltage grid

Traditional low voltage grids are equipped with meters for the accounting of the energy consumed by customers. Recently, the use of electronic meters offers the possibility of the remote reading. This paper deals with smart sensing: a second-generation Smart Meters replacing traditional metering device, and the first generation of electronic meters, in order to extract a richer and near real-time information. This information in then transferred on a fast communication network where is needed. In other words, the Smart Meters deployed over the distribution grid create a Sensor Network used for grid control and management. The intelligent unit employed in the proposed system is able to communicate using standard metering protocols like DLMS/COSEM, allowing high-level integration with systems that use this information for both billing and customer relationship management - as is today with Automatic Meter Management systems - and for the technical management of the LV power infrastructure like Distribution Management Systems. The paper presents a pilot installation in a real grid of the smart sensor network composed about 50 new-generation Smart Meters using fast - broad-band - communication. The network of Smart Meters has been used to monitor, during a measurement campaign of two months, the Power Quality of a part of the distribution grid. During the campaign, the grid voltage is below the 5 % of the nominal value only for the 3 % of the time, despite the large presence of distributed renewable resources.

Toward smart metering application exploiting IPv6 over wM-bus

In the last years, the increasing focus on energy savings is the key factor in the transformation of the legacy distribution grid toward the so called smart grid. One of the most evident, it is the wide diffusion, in some countries, of smart metering technologies for monitoring of customer electrical consumption. The proven benefits of this technology suggested to the Italian regulative agency the adoption of similar smart solutions for water and gas meters. Currently, the transmission technology which seems to satisfy the strict constraints of power consumption and wide range is the wM-bus operating in different frequency bands, including the recently standardized portion of the spectrum around 169 MHz. This technology provides a low-power and reliable communication channel, but it is not integrated with the IP-based protocols. This may represent a limit since all the ongoing standardization efforts consider the IP suite the unifying framework for the very different network tiers of a Smart Grid. In this paper, the mapping of IPv6 protocol, over wM-bus has been proposed and evaluated in a dedicated simulation environment. The results confirm the feasibility of the proposed approach: the transmission of a typical DLMS/COSEM packet takes only few additional resources compared to wM-bus solution, although the medium access technique of wM-bus decreases the communication performance.

Performance analysis of power line communication in industrial power distribution network

Power line communication (PLC) seems to be one of the best trade-off between cost and benefit for implementing Smart Grids in industrial context. Unfortunately, industrial environment may compromise the reliability of PLC technologies due to noisy communication channel and interfering/competing PLC systems. In this work, a multi-protocol instrument for PLC performance estimation is presented. The proposed solution is able to characterize and to decode several PLC systems with different physical modulations using a software-defined architecture. A working prototype of the proposed instrument has been characterized and used in a real industrial plant in order to study potential issues affecting PLC. Application of power line communication (PLC) in industrial environmentDesign of instrument architecture for performance evaluation of PLC standardsImplementation of instrument using software defined radio technologyExperimental characterization of the instrumentAnalyses of the performance of PLC in a real industrial environment

Characterization of multi-standard Power Line Communication on low-voltage grid

In the last years, the introduction of distributed energy resources increases the complexity of distribution grid management system, which requires performing communication infrastructures. Moreover, an optimal power management requires a direct data exchange with home and industrial automation and energy systems. A well known technology, the Power Line Communication (PLC), seems to be able to satisfy large parts of these demands. Nevertheless, several PLC solutions have been proposed over the years, each of them satisfying the requirements of specific applications. A measurement method able to characterize the communication performance of different PLC protocols is required due to the increasing complexity of the PLC modern infrastructures. In this work, an approach based on Software Defined Radio has been proposed. This solution is able to characterize several PLC systems, based on different physical modulations, using the same experimental set-up. The characterization of a PLC system, based on DBSK modulation, in a real environment, clearly demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed approach.

A smartphone-enhanced pill-dispenser providing patient identification and in-take recognition

The wider and wider availability of powerful, low-cost mobile devices (e.g., smartphones or tablets) is deeply changing healthcare, so that the mHealth term has been coined. The announcement of healthcare projects by market big players as Apple and Samsung confirms this trend. In particular, the opportunity to collect reliable patient data automatically allows to enhance patient/user self-management and helps in better delivering therapies. In this paper, authors propose an innovative architecture for a smart pill-dispenser enhanced by a smartdevice that furnishes the capability of automatically identifying the user, other than logging medicine in-take activities. A real-world prototype, based on an emulated pill-dispenser connected via an NFC link to different smartdevices, has been purposely realized. Experimental tests confirm the architecture feasibility. Low-cost requirements are satisfied and a user-friendly interface has been implemented.

Flexible Wireless Sensor Network for smart lighting applications

Currently, there is a growing demand for energy efficient solutions in different areas. The improvement of the quality of service and the reduction of resource waste is the goal of new solutions. Smart grids, smart metering systems and smart distributed control systems are the most interesting results of the last years, going to the direction of a new concept: the Smart City. The smartness of these solutions relies of a pervasive communication infrastructure to move information from “production points” to “consuming points”. This work is the description of the research project and development of enhance technologies for a smart, remotely controlled, street lighting system that is also able to include smart metering features. Even if a city delivers very different services, integrated, multi-service, systems have to be preferred thanks to their economical sustainability. The core of the project is an efficient routing strategy for large areas Wireless Sensor Network based on IEEE802.15.4 standard. This paper is focused on the development and performance assessment of the infrastructure for the remote control of the system and the validation in terms of average delivery delay of the measurement/control information.

Efficient R-peak detection algorithm for real-time analysis of ECG in portable devices

Detection of R-peaks in an electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition is the primary goal of any algorithm for the automatic processing of ECG signals. Several methods have been proposed in the past to accomplish this task, but usually they are designed for the use in clinical situations, where strict real-time requirements are not always needed and availability of devices with high computational resources is not a problem. The recent and broad success of personal and portable devices for health monitoring has opened a new scenario, in which new algorithms need to be developed in order to satisfy constraints due to limited computational resources and the need of having embedded and real-time data processing. This work describes an efficient algorithm for the R-peak detection, designed for low-cost and low-performing portable devices. Performance of the proposed approach, evaluated with a set of well-known ECG waveform, is comparable with traditional methods found in literature. Finally, the successful implementation of the algorithm in a smartphone-based low-cost ECG acquisition system has validated the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Integrating remote sensors in a smartphone: The project "sensors for ANDROID in embedded systems"

Nowadays, smartphones integrate high quality sensors and communication systems, easily managed by simple APPs under Android. On the contrary, managing remote sensors requires a big effort in programming, both on the sensor and on the Smartphone side. In this work, a solution for filling this gap is proposed, providing the instruments to easily handle remote sensors, exactly as if they were embedded in Android environment. The work exploits the Bluetooth 4.0-4.1 technology and realizes a library for remote smart sensors managing. Two new tools are described: a framework, which allows the Android developers to handle the remote resources (i.e. sensors and actuators) with the same approach to the embedded resources; a tool for programming and addressing the resources of the remote sensors. The proposed architecture is experimentally evaluated in a possible scenario of home automation.