Implementing Optical Port Data Communication in Energy Meters using DLMS/COSEM

Abstract

Energy meters are used for commercial purposes to record consumption of energy by consumer and correspondingly billing the consumer. Indian metering industry is a heterogeneous one with multiple communication protocols so even though there are many communication technologies used today for meter reading applications they lack the properties of interoperability and homogeneity. The presented solution describes a microcontroller-based device, which works on an Open Protocol, that provides real time local data display and record, for several electrical parameters, acquired from a power and energy meter device through optical communication. The open protocol used here is IEC 62056, which helps to overcome most of the challenges regarding data acquisition, uniformity and homogeneity among various energy meter manufacturers in India. The proposed system focuses on DLMS COSEM Metering application protocol and provides guidelines on the implementation of DLMS COSEM in clients (data collection units) as well as in servers (Meters). The device is designed to be connected in a home, or residence, which makes it very useful as an interface for Optical Port Data Communication.