Collaborative Meter Data Collection for Smart Community with Active Energy Balancing

A smart community enhances life quality and benefits of community members by sharing information. Energy information, i.e., meter data, is becoming more important than ever due to energy management in a microgrid. Meter data collection typically requires either human intervention or dedicated communication infrastructure; it causes a long processing time, frequent data uncertainty, or high-cost infrastructure deployment. Meter data collection is not easy in the microgrid where energy consumption and generation need to be managed. Therefore, this paper proposes a collaborative meter data collection scheme to achieve data reliability and low latency with feasible technology deployment to our real worlds. This scheme uses Bluetooth low energy (BLE) for broadcasting meters and pervasive smartphones of community members for data collection. That is, meters broadcast data over the air; then, any smartphones nearby receive the data and transfer them to the server. Evaluation and analysis are performed over BLE beacons and Android/iOS smartphones in metrics of latency and received data number. The results show that pervasive smartphones can collaborate to collect meter data in various meter density, communication distances, and beacon configurations. This scheme enables meter data collection for energy management in a smart microgrid community without human intervention and high-cost infrastructure.