Commissioning of an AMR Prototype System by PLC Technology

In 1980, the novel PLC system was used as a new system to communicate several computers in a building. Then, the PLC communication reliability and transfer rate up to 1600 bps was developed. PLC communication can work in environments with unpredictable parameters and long distances (Nunn, 1997). Nowadays, this communication channel is used in high speed transfer called broad power line (BPL). The main advantage of PLC is availability of its infrastructures in electrical network. In addition, by the extended form of this network, all consumers, even at long distance, can be accessed. Therefore, it is cost effective. Its optimum frequency range of this channel is 70-160 KHz. But, there are some problems. Noise is considered as the main constraint (Abraham, 1992). The main recourses of noise are as follows: a) 50 Hz harmonics that cause maximum disturbance in high speed data transferring and mostly attenuate and become narrow band at frequencies more than 30 kHz. B) The background noise that generated by household equipments, c) burst noise caused by industrial loads. Generally, noise of PLC channel is reduced in higher frequencies. Loss and attenuation are the other constraints as well as signal dispersion. Signal provides by actual channel limitation like bandwidth limitations and non-linearity leading to delay distortion of signal. Automatic meter reading (AMR) is one of the fields that can be performed by PLC communication channel. In this paper an AMR system besides of the above constraints is described.