Home energy monitoring system using wireless mesh network

Abstract

In the past few years, there have been a lot of interests in combining Power Line and Wireless Communication technologies for Home energy monitoring and Home automation/control systems. The combination of these technologies gives a wider and better coverage of services to the user. With the increasing number of internet usage and advanced development in networking areas, remote energy monitoring has been made possible. For project wise, Ethernet-driven and Wireless-Zigbee energy monitoring devices are being used. Based on the US consumer electronic market, ZigBee/802.15.4 has been the winning application of wireless networking solutions for Smart energy and Automatic Meter Reading (ARM).

Throughout the project, the author needs to develop a web-driven energy monitoring system. This system includes the setting up of the communication link between the web server and the energy measurement devices. The system will capture the measurement data from ION7350 energy meter which is manufactured by Schneider. The meter will be used to measure the total energy consumption of the building prototype. The system will also capture the measurement data from 3 Wireless-Zigbee energy meters which are manufactured by Plogg to measure each specific electrical appliance. Scripting languages such as VBScript, JavaScript, and AJAX and database technology such as MS.SQL have been used in order to develop a dynamic web server. Various approaches have also been used to enable the server to retrieve the data in real time, the first approach is by performing TCP/IP socket programming and the second approach is by using the HTTP Web Request methods.