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Universal smart energy communication platform

Article · April 2014

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 Universal Smart Energy Communication Platform

Jiri Hosek, Pavel Masek, Dominik Kovac Michal Ries Franz Kröpfl
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication Institute of Telecommunications Telekom Austria Group
Brno University of Technology Vienna University of Technology Lassallestraße 9, A-1020
Technicka 12, 616 00 Brno, Czech Republic Karlsplatz 13, 1040 Vienna, Austria Wien, Austria
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Abstract—Online data collection is crucial for increasing according to HGI recommendation [5] and in parallel coexists
efficiency of energy consumption and reducing environmental with other access technologies [6].
impacts. Moreover, utility market liberalization and parallel EC
requirements on smart measurement brought new challenges Currently, there are many new solutions for smart home
for utility and telecommunication providers. More Advanced gateways at the market [7], but generic drawback of these
Metering Infrastructure (AMI) networks have been proposed solutions is those are dedicated just for specific service or
with not clear widely accepted solution. Our study investigates product or provide generic but cost ineffective solution [8].
feasibility of cost efficient measurement architecture based on Therefore, it is necessary to come up with new generic, cost
already deployed network and home access technologies. Devel- effective solution for smart utility measurement which will
oped system running on the smart home gateway acts as a multi be based on actual residential access gateway technologies
purpose enabler providing a real time smart meter data collection
and visualization, but can be used for any home automation
and already deployed data networks. Furthermore, the access
services as well. technology should provide sufficient quality of service (QoS)
for machine to machine (M2M) type traffic and sufficient level
of network security [9].
I. I NTRODUCTION In our study we investigated the readiness of residential
gateway access technology for the utility smart metering.
The liberalization of utility markets and in parallel system-
We proposed and demonstrate middleware solution providing
atic need for more efficient utility consumption (electricity, gas,
the binding between the home access technology and home
water) brought a demand for accurate, immediate and online
automation systems at standard IP router. The demonstrator
data collection from smart meters for society, utility providers
provides a user friendly utility data-handler accessible locally
and for individuals as well [1], [2].
or remotely through smart devices. Moreover, the proposed
The research for the most suitable communication platform solution is open for other home gateway applications.
for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) which is the core The rest of paper is organized as follows. The Section 2
part of modern smart grids is currently very active among is providing a brief background for the smart metering service
different research and industry institutions. There are several category. New universal integration platform for home automa-
possible solutions like Power Line Communication (PLC), tion - openHAB, which we used as a key component in our
3G/4G mobile network, VDSL/ADSL broadband network, proposed platform, is introduced in the Section 3. The Section
Wireless M-Bus, etc. Each of these technologies has certain 4 presents the architecture and design of our openHAB-based
pros and cons and is intended to be used in different part smart metering demonstrator. All results and outputs of our
of AMI. E.g. the PLC is frequently discussed as perspective performed study are summarized in the Conclusion.
solution for AMI, but actual state of PLC technology has
limitations on communication range, data throughput, national
directives and also full deployment of PLC data access will II. S ERVICE C ATEGORY S MART M ETERING
generate additional costs in power line network infrastructure The smart metering refers to the use of intelligent utility
[3]. Moreover, the full PLC network deployment and mainte- (energy, gas or water) meters and measuring instruments in
nance for all utility providers will generate additional financial order to make the utility consumption more visible and to en-
cost. able automatic utility management. Smart meters bring an end
to estimated bills and home visits from meter readers because
On the other hand, the wired and wireless broadband telco they can record and report utility consumption automatically
operators have already deployed a network infrastructure with and remotely [5]. Utility companies are going to invest in smart
sufficient throughput and in parallel have already deployed metering infrastructure to become more efficient in how they
the Internet access enablers (IP routers) which can serve engage with their customers.
as home gateways for smart metering or any other home
automation service. Therefore, mobile of fixed telecommu- The service category Smart Metering as a part of smart grid
nication networks seem to be a sufficient platform for the and smart home automation concepts is currently attracting
utility metering. Nevertheless, the current challenge for telco a lot of attention of research [10], [11] and also industry
operators is to orchestrate such generic solution for the smart communities and will play an increasingly important role in
utility measurement within their network [4]. The next open residential and commercial buildings, because the energy usage
issue is if home gateways are able to collect and process data in these buildings is responsible for about 40% of the EU’s
total energy consumption and represents about 36% of CO2
emissions in the EU and about 40% in the US. Therefore,
buildings should be at the centre of any solution to reduce
GHG emissions. Due to mentioned facts the finding of optimal
solution for smart metering is in the strategic scope of many
standardization organizations [12] and initiatives, e.g. Home
Gateway Initiative (HGI) [5].

III. OPEN HAB P LATFORM

There are many studies [13], [14] proving that if users
are more informed and have the information about utility
consumption available in real-time, clear and comfortable form
(e.g. through their smartphones or tablets) it affects their
behavior in order to save more energy. Hence, it is really
important to provide a user friendly environment for utility
management as a part of whole smart grid concept.
In this section, the openHAB (open Home Automation
Bus) platform [6], which was used as a communication and
integration technology for developed smart metering demon- Fig. 1. Generic openHAB communication mechanism
strator, is described. The openHAB project aims at providing
a universal integration platform for all things around the home
automation including also the utility metering. It is a pure Java Also the automation logic execution engine always needs to
solution, fully based on OSGi. The Equinox OSGi runtime be informed about the current states. The Item Repository
and Jetty as a web server build the core foundation of the avoids each bundle to cache states themselves for their internal
runtime. openHAB is designed to be vendor-neutrala and use. It also makes sure that the state is in sync for all those
brings together different bus systems, hardware devices and bundles and it provides the possibility to persist states to the
interface protocols by dedicated bindings. These bindings send file system or a database, so that they are even kept throughout
and receive commands and status updates on the openHAB a system restart [6]. The diagram (see Fig. 1) shows generic
event bus. This concept allows designing user interfaces with communication mechanism of openHAB platform.
a unique look&feel, but with the possibility to operate devices
based on a big number of different technologies. Besides the B. openHAB User Interface
user interfaces, it also brings the power of automation logics The openHAB provides a generic textual configuration for
across different system boundaries [6]. its user interfaces. The so-called Sitemap is a tree structure of
widgets which define different pages of a UI and their content.
A. Communication Mechanism Widgets can be associated to items, for which they should
show the status and/or control elements. The definition of the
The openHAB has two different internal communication
Sitemap is quite abstract by design. It is supposed to be a
channels, an asynchronous Event Bus and a stateful repository
suitable UI model for different kinds of user interfaces, so
which can be queried. The event bus is the base service of
that the user does not have to configure each of them in case
openHAB. All bundles that do not require stateful behavior
he sets up multiple UIs. If a UI has further requirements on
should use it to inform other bundles about events and to
top of the Sitemap, it is still possible to introduce additional
be updated by other bundles on external events. All protocol
configuration options which are then specific for the UI in
bindings (which provide the link to the real hardware devices)
question [6].
should be communicating via the Event Bus. As a technical
foundation, the OSGi EventAdmin service [15] is used by Even though the openHAB is vendor and system indepen-
openHAB. It is important to note that openHAB is not meant dent solution and described user interface can be implemented
to reside on (or near) actual hardware devices and as thus to above any platform, there are four standard UIs available.
remotely communicate with many other distributed openHAB The default web based UI is called WebApp.Net and can
instances. Instead, openHAB rather serves as an integration be accessed through any web browser to remotely control
hub between such devices and as a mediator between different openHAB system. The UI is implemented in the bundle
protocols that are spoken between these devices. In a typical org.openhab.ui.webapp. It registers a servlet with Jetty and
installation, just one instance of openHAB is running on some processes incoming requests. The UI makes use of the Sitemap
central server. definition file in order to render the pages [6]. Users can
construct custom HTML blocks and thus create own web UI
Not all functionality can be covered purely by stateless
design. Another web-based UI is using the GreenT technology
services. Due to this reason openHAB also offers the Item
which provides instantaneous communication between the web
Repository which is connected to the Event Bus and keeps
user application and the openHAB runtime.
track of the current status of all items. The Item Repository
can be used whenever it is necessary to be able to access the The openHAB provides also two native user interfaces for
current state of items. E.g. a user interface needs to display mobile devices running iOS or Android systems. Since both
the current state of items in the moment of the user access. mobile clients are open-source users can modify their design
 Fig. 3. Generic home energy management scenario

Fig. 2. HABDroid - example of openHAB UI application

and content. The Android client is called HABDroid (see Fig.

2) and this UI was used within the developed demonstrator
which is described in the following section.

IV. D EVELOPMENT OF OPEN HAB- BASED S MART

M ETERING D EMONSTRATOR
In energy management systems, domestic appliances
(washer, heater, etc.) would communicate through a local Fig. 4. Smart metering openHAB-based demonstrator
network while terminal devices (e.g. fixed and mobile phones,
home gateways) act as gateways to telecommunication net-
works. The connection is established among both external Smart home gateways usually provide more WAN in-
platforms (e.g. via the broadband connection) and local agents terfaces (e.g. Ethernet, VDSL/ADSL or 3G/4G) to interact
able to optimize energy usage in the home. This optimization with remote utility management systems or end user devices.
requires an energy gateway function somewhere in the home The choice of proper technology depends on many factors,
which is able to monitor/control the consumption of the nevertheless all of them are utilizing the TCP/IP platform.
equipment [5]. Therefore, the most challenging task is the design of mid-
The energy gateway function can be instantiated in various dleware application running on SH-GW and implementing all
physical components, ranging from the smart meter, a dedi- needed logics for capturing, processing and forwarding utility
cated device with specific connectivity, or in the home gateway data. Hence, developed middleware plays a key role of our
itself. The choice of location depends on several factors such smart metering demonstrator.
as the need to preserve the installed base, or a planned new In order to convince users to be more energy consumption
gateway deployment. E.g. the HGI architecture [5] focuses aware, it is really important to provide them (not only to
on the case where this function is embedded in the Smart utility providers/distributors) with measurement data in real-
Home Gateway (SH-GW) [16]. The IP routers available on time and attractive form. There many user friendly solutions
today’s market have sufficient computing power so together to visualize data, e.g. DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance)
with developed middleware can serve as multi purpose SH- smart TV, UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) media frameworks
GWs including the smart metering service. [17], openHAB technology or social networks, but usually the
bindings between smart meter and the visualizing application
A. Generic Home Energy Management Concept are missing. Therefore, our demonstrator is addressing also
The main idea behind this research work was to provide this issue.
a cost effective solution for smart metering which will uti-
lize already available fixed or mobile network infrastructure B. openHAB Solution for Smart Metering
of telecommunication operators and provide a user friendly The architecture of developed demonstrator is shown in
access to measured data. The subsequent goal was to achieve Fig. 4. We have used the smart meter KAMSTRUP [18] as
overall energy efficiency in the home network so that each a source of consumption data compliant to Open Metering
device is running in an energy efficient manner. Integration System (OMS) specification [19]. The consumption data is
with the existing customer network is a key requirement in transmitted using Wireless M-Bus technology. The update
order to optimize the efficiency of home energy management, interval of the consumption data transmission was configured
and so fits well to the scope of the HGI. The generic concept to 10 seconds to provide fast feedback on the electricity
the home energy management scenario is shown in Fig. 3. consumption. The meter uses the Wireless M-Bus Application
Different household appliances are connected with the smart Protocol [19] to regularly broadcasts the value of the meter
meter which regularly forwards the information about energy registers using a WMBus SND NR message.
consumption to the smart home gateway. As the communica-
tion technology between the smart meter and SH-GW the PLC Data from smart meter is received by Amber Wireless M-
or very perspective wireless M-Bus can be used. Bus USB adapter [20] connected to the SH-GW. This module
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
[19] OMS Group, “Open Metering System Specification - Volume 2:
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of Brno University of Technology.

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