High-accuracy distributed simulation environment for PRIME networks analysis and improvement

Smart grid is a recent proposal that intends to provide intelligence to the energy distribution infrastructure which is becoming one of the more important challenges for the industrial and scientific community in the near future. One of the main components of this smart grid is an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), which replaces the analog meters with computerized systems that report usage over digital communication interfaces. Among the different technologies that can be employed to deploy a smart metering infrastructure, PRIME standard has recently attracted a lot of interest. However, due to the novelty of the technology, there is a lack of PRIME network simulators and development tools. In this work it is presented a high accuracy simulator that employs real commercial PRIME nodes code achieving a great grade of realism. This tool has already been introduced in our company code development process and is being used for both code performance improving and network deployment planning.