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local HAN data concentrators to the
utilities’ data management systems.
Cellular is also used in metering
communication hubs, the so-called
‘Smart Meter Gateways’. This is an
AMI topology, successfully deployed or
planned in many European countries
and in Japan, where residential and
commercial buildings use cellular to
connect electricity meters or separate
gateway devices to the utilities’
back-haul meter data management
systems. The gateway device is then
used to provide connectivity through
industrial, scientific and medical (ISM)
wireless RF (Wireless M-Bus 868 in
Europe, Wi-SUN 920MHz in Japan and
ZigBee) to meters and other systems
in the building.
The move to 4G LTE
Their cost-efficiency and sufficient data
speeds mean 2G and 3G connectivity
have been commonly used in smart
meters globally. However, for future
time, which is why a key requirement
of smart meters is that their firmware
(the embedded software that controls
the smart meter) can be updated over
the air (OTA).
Sending an engineer to do this
would be both expensive and slow
– prohibitively so in a situation
where millions of meters need to
be upgraded, as could be the case
following a security breach. Doing the
update wirelessly removes the need
for a service engineer to be sent out.
An OTA firmware upgrade is typically
hard to achieve in most sub-GHz low-
power radio networks, which generally
only support downlink rates of a few
hundred bytes of information per day
to each device.
Conversely, efficient wireless upgrades
are possible with Firmware Over The
Air (FOTA), a feature used extensively
in mobile phones, and now supported
in cellular machine-to-machine (M2M)
technology. It enables users to update
their module firmware over a carrier
network.
The use of cellular
technology in smart
metering
Because of these inherent benefits,
cellular technology is currently
enjoying widespread use in smart
metering deployments, providing
end-to-end connectivity in metering
infrastructure. A large share of
residential and commercial networks
are being deployed using 2G
General Packet Radio Service (GPRS)
solutions, while industrial smart
meters are predominantly based on
3G technology.
Even when utilities deploy point-
to-multipoint solutions based on
short-range radio protocols (such as
wireless M-Bus 169 MHz, or other
proprietary Low-Power Wide-Area
radio technology), cellular is still used
to provide back-haul connectivity from
Wireless Special Edition
64 l New-Tech Magazine Europe