Development of an Automatic Meter Reading and Outage Management System using LoRaWAN Technology

Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) is an important part of the distribution system that can provide data from customers for utilities to monitor. With the help of communication technology, it can also be used for outage management. When outages occur, AMR may send outage notification to utilities for assessing the situation. AMR can also be polled at any time to determine power and status. However, it would not be efficient for utilities to poll every meter in an affected area of the network due to time and data constraints especially with Low-Power Wide-Area Network as LoRaWAN. LoRaWAN technology can provide very long-range transmission with low power consumption. However, it also has some restrictions including a limited payload, capacity and network size. This paper explains how LoRaWAN can be employed in an AMR setting, including for the on-demand reading feature and the polling algorithm for outage management system (OMS), which is used to identify system conditions.