A Scalable Communication Architecture for Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), seen as foundation for overall grid modernization, is an integration of many technologies that provides an intelligent connection between consumers and system operators [ami 2008]. One of the biggest challenge that AMI faces is to scalable collect and manage a huge amount of data from a large number of customers. In our paper, we address this challenge by introducing a mixed peer-to-peer (P2P) and client-server communication architecture for AMI in which metering data is aggregated and processed distributedly at multiple levels and in a tree-like manner. Through analysis we show that the architecture is featured with load scalability, resiliency with failure and partly self-organization. The experiments performed in large scale French Grid5000 platform [G5k] shows the communication efficiency in the proposed architecture.