Survey and performance comparison of AMR over PLC standards

Automatic meter reading (AMR) is an application implemented by power utilities which is becoming increasingly important in the utilities sector. It could be included in the more general environment of demand side management, which satisfies the need for more improved communications. AMR offers a better financial return due to the inclusion of other applications. Although there are several international standards which address AMR, most deployments are currently using proprietary systems. This fact may reflect that current standards do not fully cover this area. Since the power network reaches all energy meters, a convenient way to deploy AMR is to use the power lines as a transmission medium. The present-day situation is that there is mounting pressure to deploy AMR systems in a bid to provide better management of the energy demand in a bid to reduce global warming and create a more sustainable electrical system in our environmentally conscious society. This paper is focused on analyzing different standards and specifications related to AMR over powerline communications (PLC). Furthermore, two of them are chosen, implemented, and simulated using the OPNET modeler. The main goal of the implemented applications is to obtain comparative results of the two most known standard applications in AMR over PLC.