Toward smart metering application exploiting IPv6 over wM-bus

In the last years, the increasing focus on energy savings is the key factor in the transformation of the legacy distribution grid toward the so called smart grid. One of the most evident, it is the wide diffusion, in some countries, of smart metering technologies for monitoring of customer electrical consumption. The proven benefits of this technology suggested to the Italian regulative agency the adoption of similar smart solutions for water and gas meters. Currently, the transmission technology which seems to satisfy the strict constraints of power consumption and wide range is the wM-bus operating in different frequency bands, including the recently standardized portion of the spectrum around 169 MHz. This technology provides a low-power and reliable communication channel, but it is not integrated with the IP-based protocols. This may represent a limit since all the ongoing standardization efforts consider the IP suite the unifying framework for the very different network tiers of a Smart Grid. In this paper, the mapping of IPv6 protocol, over wM-bus has been proposed and evaluated in a dedicated simulation environment. The results confirm the feasibility of the proposed approach: the transmission of a typical DLMS/COSEM packet takes only few additional resources compared to wM-bus solution, although the medium access technique of wM-bus decreases the communication performance.