A Mesh Networking Based Solution on Power Management

Abstract

The development of automatic metering system and power management is presented in this paper. The system consists of Zigbee Digital Power meters installed at every consumer‘s unit and an automatic e-Billing system at the energy provider‘s side. The Zigbee Digital Power meter (ZPM) is a single phase digital kWh power meter with embedded Zigbee modem which utilizes the Wireless sensor network to send its power usage reading and the electricity bill back and forth wirelessly. At the power provider side an e-billing system is used to manage the received zigbee meter reading, compute the billing cost, and to publish billing notification to its respective consumer through wireless modem. Also the circuit is designed to manage power, when the generation of power is less available at the electricity board. The controller prioritizes the electrical appliances in each node (i.e. houses) similar to that of a mesh network. Then it gives the highest priority to the most necessary appliance needed by the user then in the same way it gives priority to all other appliances connected to the node. When the power value reaches below a threshold, the PC at the power provider section gives a command to the controller, to supply the power only to the higher priority appliances and stop providing power to the lower ones. Likewise depending on the availability, power is equally distributed to all the nodes connected to the energy provider so that each node can at least make use of the most used appliance without total power shutdown.