An Ad-Hoc Low Cost Wireless Sensor Network for Smart Gas Metering

Abstract

The monitoring of power consumption has become of a great interest in recent years as well as the innovative technologies available to realize Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have experienced a great growth. While smart metering technologies for electric energy are already established, as sensors power supply comes directly from power lines, WSN nodes for gas metering should necessarily be equipped with long life batteries. The presented work describes a new prototypal low cost WSN designed ad hoc for gas smart metering. The network has a star topology: each sensor node can be completely integrated with standard reed relay gas meter, and it is capable to measure the gas consumption. The information is sent to the central node (the Access Point, AP) through an RF links. The sensor nodes have been designed with custom electronics and a proprietary firmware, in order to work with a common 3.6 V lithium battery which is able to ensure a life period of about 10 years for each node. Only the AP must be connected directly to electric power. The AP is connected through the RS-232 interface to a control embedded PC equipped with a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) framework: it stores all the information coming from each node in a coherent database and allows au thorized users to check the network status using a web interface. The WSN is self-learning and it is capable to detect new nodes joining the network without altering the normal operative flow. Moreover e-mail and SMS alerts can be ac tivated to alert if a node is disconnected from the network or some problems occur. A first prototype of the WSN has been already tested achieving good results.