A survey of technical requirements and consumer application standards for IP-based smart grid AMI network

The smart grid is a new advanced electrical network promoted by the government to address environmental sustainability, energy generation, distribution and consumption efficiency issues. As one of the enabling technologies, Advanced Metering Infrastructure refers to systems which measure, collect and analyze energy usage, and interact with advanced devices such as smart meters through various communication media either on request or on pre-defined schedules. This paper focuses on proposing the technical requirements imposed on the communications network for AMI. Then we examine each of the proposed AMI consumer application standards found in open literature based on these requirements. We will discuss the system engineering approach taken by NIST/EPRI to develop standards for smart grid and AMI and highlight outstanding security and interoperability issues concerned for deploying smart grid AMI. We compare the performances of consumer application standards in addressing these open issues. Finally, we conclude and propose our future work.