Energy-Efficient Meter Data Aggregation Protocol for (AMR) Automatic Meter Reading Networks

In recent, due to convenient and inexpensive installations, flexibility, and scalability, the interests in wireless AMR are being increased more and more. However, the wireless AMR network, which generally covers large areas, may create energy wastage problem and high interference hazard due to a large amount of concurrent-intensive metering data in the network. In this paper, in order to improve energy efficiency and reduce the possibility of interferences by minimizing data traffic in the wireless-based AMR network, specifically in large scale, a novel energy-efficient meter data aggregation method is proposed, which is inspired from the data-centric routing in wireless sensor networks. Through theoretical analysis and simulations, it is demonstrated that the EMDA can gather data with the minimum number of transmissions in the network even though the number of nodes is increased.