DEVELOPMENT OF SMART METER BRIDGING 6LOWPAN DEVICES TO WI-FI IEEE1888 NETWORK

Abstract

In this dissertation a Smart Meter (SM) prototype was developed specifically for Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS). Furthermore, an application-layered protocol, known as IEEE1888 was implemented. To overcome the restriction on the number of Internet addresses in the case of IPv4, and to reduce energy consumption, IPv6 Low power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) and TCP/IPv6 Wi-Fi protocol stacks were selected as the IEEE1888 supporting layers. Integrating the advantages of IEEE1888, Wi-Fi IPv6 and 6LoWPAN into SM helped this research to prototyped successfully a smart meter which functions as a gateway of 6LoWPAN nodes to the Wi-Fi IPv6 IEEE1888 network. In order to test the gateway function, three 6LoWPAN nodes with a few sensors were also developed. An IEEE1888 Application on mobile devices running on Android operating system was employed to read 6LoWPAN nodes’ history data from the IEEE1888 Storage or their latest data from the SM/gateway. The application may also control the on/off status of switches, located at the 6LoWPAN nodes.