2018 the 6th IEEE International Conference on Smart Energy Grid Engineering

Design and Implementation of an Internet of Things Based Smart Energy Metering

Mohammad Hossein Yaghmaee Hossein Hejazi

Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (FUM) Mashhad Electrical Energy Distribution Company
Mashhad, Iran (MEEDC),
e-mail: hyaghmae@um.ac.ir Mashhad, Iran

Abstract—Internet of Things (IoT) can be used to furnish the customers at a time interval of between 15-60 minutes.
intelligent management of energy distribution and Demand Response (DR) is one of the most important
consumption in heterogeneous circumstances. In the recent applications of smart grid [3-5]. Since we need the
years, by the growth of IoT and digital technologies, smart grid customer's power consumption information to develop and
has been becoming smarter than before. The future power grid implement an efficient demand response program, with the
needs to be implemented in a distributed topology that can proper implementation of this kind of system, the utility
dynamically absorb different energy sources. IoT can be companies can benefit this information to develop proper
utilized for various applications of the smart grid including demand response programs. To balance total demand with
distributed power plant monitoring, power generation and
the amount of supply, demand response programs can be
consumption prediction, power consumption monitoring,
utilized. For efficient demand response program, the energy
energy storage monitoring, smart meter, electric vehicle
charging, power demand side management and various area of consumption and generation information should be tracked
energy production. In this paper, by using the IoT capabilities, in real time. To achieve this goal, we need to deploy more
we have designed and implemented a smart energy metering remote sensing equipment capable of measuring, monitoring
platform consisting of smart plugs, gateway and cloud server. and communicating. As described in [6], the IoT can be used
to furnish intelligent management of energy distribution and
Keywords-Smart Grid, Energy Monitoring, Internet of consumption in heterogeneous circumstances. In the recent
Things, Internet of Energy years, by the growth of IoT and digital technologies, smart
grid has been becoming smarter than before. The future
I. INTRODUCTION power grid needs to be implemented in a distributed
topology that can dynamically absorb different energy
In order to develop and implement smart power grid sources.
applications in a wide range of countries, the need to design In this paper, we introduce the Smart Energy Metering
smart energy metering infrastructure is well understood. The (SEM). The main purpose of SEM is to create the necessary
utility companies in this area can use the results and data infrastructure for collecting information on energy
measured by this system to make decisions and move consumption of household appliances and monitor the
towards widespread implantation of smart grid in the country. environmental parameters and provide the necessary services
Smart buildings are a major element in the optimal use of to home users. Using the proposed SEM, the following
energy and sustainability. The need to implement smart capabilities will be realized:
homes from the point of view of optimal energy - Monitoring of the instantaneous power consumption of
consumption and reducing the cost of consuming electricity each home appliances connected to the system and
by subscribers is an important issue. On the other hand, due calculating the power consumption, line voltage and power
to the extensive Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the factor of each home appliances connected to the system.
development of various network connectivity sensors, it is - Providing timely information to the customers about
possible to send instantaneous power consumption data to their current power consumption and the cost of consuming
the customers. To this end, smart hardware systems must electricity up to now.
first be designed and built. After that, home network system - Sending useful information to the customers about their
will be designed and implemented. The home gateway power consumption compared to other customers registered
connects to the home sensor nodes and receives their in the system. Each customer continuously observes its
information, and then connects to the Internet servers and power consumption, the maximum, minimum, and average
transfers the collected information to the remote server. power consumption of other customers in the system.
Maintenance, refinement and processing of data is done in - Processing the power consumption data to provide
the network server that maintains the user information in the useful information for both customers and the utility
required data storage. The system should be designed to companies.
meet the existing standards. Advanced Metering - Better forecasts of necessary energy production and
Infrastructure (AMI) utilizes the smart grid communication energy consumption in each specific area in the grid.
infrastructure to transfer metering data as well as customer - Continuous monitoring of the power grid.
consumption-related information [1], [2]. It should be noted
that the AMI can only send the total electricity consumed by

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 - Interacting with customers and managing consumption
across the network.
II. SMART ENERGY MONITORING (SEM)
In this section, we introduce the proposed Smart Energy
Monitoring (SEM) in details. The proposed system can be
used in residential and industrial centers to measure the
amount of energy consumed by each electrical device and to
apply various controls on electrical appliances. The system
can measure power consumption and power line parameters
and send them to a central server in a different way. The data
obtained can be used to predict customer consumption and
consumption schedules. The system can control the electrical
equipment and, if necessary, turn it off in the peak hours and
turn it on at non-peak hours. The system is also able to Figure 2. (a) The structure of sensor node (b) a sample sensor node
monitor and store other environmental parameters including
temperature, humidity, brightness and possible gas leakage. As shown in Fig. 2, the sensor node hardware consists of
It is possible to design and implement various smart the different parts including Current sensors, Voltage sensor,
applications on this infrastructure. If the utility companies Temperature and humidity sensor, Brightness sensor, Gas
move forward to dynamic and instantaneous pricing and leak sensor, Relay, Microcontroller unit and WiFi module. In
implementation of demand-side management services, this addition to the HTTP, for efficient data gathering and
system can be well-designed to instantly inform users of transmission, the COAP [7] protocol over WiFi network
their consumption and the current price in the network. which is a lightweight protocol and follows the REST has
As shown in Fig. 1, the proposed SEM system consists of been implemented.
three major components including sensor nodes, Gateway
and Server. The sensor node sends its information to the B. Gateway
Gateway, and the Gateway connects to the Internet through a We have developed an Android HTTP Gateway. The
communication technology such as an ADSL modem or Gateway is responsible for config the sensor nodes and
3G/4G/LTE network. Each component is introduced in the collects the sensor values by using the standard API RESTful
following section in details. commands. The collected sensor data is transferred to the
specific server for permanent storage. Each Customer has a
unique API key which is used for communication between
the Gateway and Server. This API key is used for providing
required security and authentication process. Each time
which Gateway wants to establish a connection with the
Server uses this API key in the messages.
The sensor node is accessible through IP address
192.168.4.1 in the Access Point (AP) mode. In the beginning,
the Gateway connects to the AP and programs it. By entering
the network SSID and password, the sensor node can
Figure 1. The proposed smart energy metering system connect to the Gateway through the local WiFi network. At
the end of this process, the sensor node is connected to the
local WiFi network. A spatial web service is designed in the
A. Sensor Node Gateway so that the sensor nodes are able to transfer their
To collect the customer's power consumption information, information after they connected to the WiFi network
an IoT based smart plug has been implemented. The In the implementation of this web service, the service
hardware is able to collect the other environmental feature of Android has been used. The service is one of the
parameters such as temperature/humidity, gas and light components of the Android apps that can run long behind the
sensor. scenes, so the web server is constantly running as a service
on the Android operating system, and if it stops, Android
will automatically start it. We used the NanoHTTPD library
to implement the web server in the Android Gateway. With
this famous library, you can easily get HTTP messages and
extract the information in the body and send the response as
an http message to the client if necessary. NanoHTTPD is a
light-weight HTTP server designed for embedding in other
applications, released under a Modified BSD license. It can
be used as a library component in developing other software.

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When the Gateway receives sensor node's IP address, it can programming language on the Laravel framework has been
read the data of each sensor node. used. The Server uses SQL and the MySQL database and
The overall algorithm for the Gateway function is as uses the Eloquent and ORM (Object Relation Mapping)
follows: technology to communicate with the database. For the
1. Connect to the Sensor node AP on 192.168.4.1 panel's design the HTML, CSS, Javascript languages, and
2. Choose name for sensor node and send name, IP address of Bootstrap library on the AdminLTE framework have been
gateway, SSID and password of local network to the sensor
node.
used. The HTTP protocol and JSON data structure are used
3. Receive the sensor node IP address from the POST message and to transfer data between the Server and the Gateway. To
update the database. secure this connection, each user has an own API-Token that
4. Sensor node initiates a web server and sends its IP address to can be generated on its panel and, if disclosed, can quickly
the gateway remove it from its panel and build a new token. This token is
5. Read sensor node data
6. Collect data from all sensor nodes and send them to the server
used to communicate between the Server and the gateway for
in a single message authentication. As shown in Fig. 3, the MVC (Model View
7. Sleep for T seconds and go to step 4 Controller) architecture has been used.
When the Gateway sends the node’s data to the server, The Server to Gateway communication is based on
the server sends customer power consumption, minimum RESTfull architecture. Gateway collects environment
power consumption, maximum power consumption, average information from sensors and sends this information to the
power consumption, customer cost, customer rank, and Server every T seconds. The Server then responds to
power grid state, in response to the gateway. This Gateway by sending some community statistics data such as
information is shown on the home gateway screen which maximum consumption, minimum consumption, average
provides useful information on the user's power consumption consumption, and user consumption and user cost. The
and his/her status in the community. The Gateway can also Server also sends the commands that the user has configured
show this information using a chart on its screen. In this on their panel for the Gateway, and Gateway implements
chart, user can see the trends of the power consumption and these commands in the sensor nodes.
the minimum, maximum and average power consumption of
the community. To implement this graph we use the III. IMPLEMENTATION RESULTS
androidplot library. These libraries can be used to plot To collect the customer's home information, an IoT board
dynamic or static charts in the gateway screen. The containing DHT22 temperature/humidity sensor, MQ-5 gas
implemented Gateway has the ability to manage and update sensor, light sensor, current sensor, 5 V relay and an
the names and categories of all nodes connected to it. MCU/WiFi controller has been implemented. We have
According to the categories, it is possible to view and developed the home gateway on a Raspberry Pi 3 with the
analyze the consumption of each electrical appliances on the Raspbian operating system using JavaFX platform. An
server side which will be explained in the next subsection. Android gateway has also been developed. We have also
implemented an SCT current sensor to measure the total
C. Server
power consumption of the customers. The proposed
architecture can be considered as a backup system for the
AMI network. Furthermore, as the energy consumption and
the other parameters are collected by the system it is possible
to developed and implement many smart grid applications
such as AMI, Demand Response and Energy Management
System and privacy/security applications. Fig. 4 shows the
smart plugs and a sample output of the JavaFX gateway. The
system was implemented in some customers home in
Mashhad city. The collected data of a specific customers is
shown in Fig. 5.

Figure 3. Model view controller architecture

The main task of the Server is to communicate with the

Gateways to capture sensor nodes information as well as to
send control commands and related data to the Gateways. It
also provides a user portal for instant access to the Gateway
control commands. To develop the Server, the PHP
(a)

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 the electrical appliances and, if necessary, turn them off in
the peak hours and turn them on at non-peak hours. Some of
the benefits of the proposed system are as follows:
- Full design in accordance with the IoT standards
and protocols.
- Ability to function both in Web Server/ Web Client
- Supports HTTP, COAP, MQTT and various data
formats including JSON, HTML
- Ability to collect power consumption information
and environmental parameters
- Ability to support and implement demand response
programs.
- Support for various programming platform
including Android, Linux, and Java.
(b) - Reducing the cost of electricity for subscribers and
Figure 4. The system components (a) IoT based smart plug (b) Screenshot reducing the amount of load at peak hours of the electricity
of the customer gateway grid.
Provide instant information to users about their power
consumption and power consumption data of other users
defined in the system.
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Figure 5. An example of data collected from the system [6] N. Ruiz, , I. Cobelo, and J. Oyarzabal, "A direct load control model
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IV. CONCLUSION [7] Z. Shelby, K. Hartke, C. Bormann, “The Constrained Application
Protocol (CoAP)”, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)Request
In this paper, we proposed the smart energy monitoring for Comments: 7252, June 2014
which can measure power consumption and power line
parameters and send them to a central server on the Internet
through an intermediate Gateway. The system can control

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