Smart metres are being used by utilities to support attempts to reduce operating costs and keep consumer bills low. However, insufficient technology and a lack of standardisation are impeding the widespread adoption of smart metres. Further issues develop as a result of the performance and flexibility limitations of various existing smart metre communication technologies, such as PLC and M BUS. Furthermore, the pervasive use of proprietary solutions (such as mesh and sub-GHz) greatly hinders interoperability and locks utilities into expensive to install and maintain niche communication infrastructures and technologies.
As a result, the smart utility metre business is in desperate need of a standardised, future-proofed solution that ensures performance, scalability, interoperability, installation flexibility, and is relatively low-cost to implement and maintain due to economies of scale. The DLMS/COSEM standard (IEC 62056/ EN 13757-1) has the most potential as the most commonly adopted worldwide standard for utility metre data interchange. DLMS is at the heart of smart metre standardisation initiatives in Europe and internationally due to its broad breadth and flexibility.
What Exactly is DLMS?
The DLMS User Association developed and maintains a set of standards known as DLMS. It was first published in 1999 and adopted by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) in 2002 as part of the IEC 62056 smart metering standard series. The American National Standard Institute, or ANSI, recently adopted it in 2019. The DLMS/Companion Specification for Energy Metering (COSEM) standard has been widely adopted, with over a hundred million metres globally adopting it – including by big utilities such as EDF, Ibedrola, and EDP.
Cellular, PLC, Zigbee, WMBus, and Prime-PLC are among the wired and wireless communication standards supported by DLMS. Because of its ability to offer an application layer apart from the media layer, utilities and end-users can utilise the same application across a variety of communication methods.
The lack of convergence or standardisation on the sort of communications link utilised to connect DLMS metres to the back-end utility infrastructure is a key hindrance to realising the promise of DLMS. The good news is that DLMS is built on the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) concept, which allows it to work with a variety of communication mediums. That includes cellular IoT, a developing wireless technology based on proven, durable, and highly secure LTE (‘4G’) networks that are ideally suited to the challenges of linking smart metres to the cloud.
LTE-M and/or NB-IoT coverage is provided by many top network operators in the US and much of Western Europe, for example, and extends to over 100% of the population using current 4G networks.
Cellular IoT, which is based on decades of international standards, offers a real chance to standardise smart utility metering access to the cloud in a way that wasn’t before possible. However, the underlying technology is sophisticated and might be intimidating to those who are unfamiliar with it. However, a collaboration between Gurux, a Finnish smart metre firm, and Nordic Semiconductor now promises to make developing a DLMS smart metre connection over cellular IoT far easier.
The utilisation of ‘plug and play’ highly integrated hardware, as well as open-source software examples, contributes to the simplicity. An open-source proof-of-concept (PoC) smart electricity metre with a cellular IoT module has been created to make it easier for smart metre makers and utility companies to take advantage of cellular IoT. The proof-of-concept addresses the engineering problems that come with deploying cellular IoT for a smart metre reading.
Setting the Standard
Smart metres are no exception to the rule that standardisation works across all technologies and sectors. Standardization is approaching, but there has yet to be agreement on a single solution — albeit DLMS is quickly becoming the favoured option. A comparable convergence is necessary for the technology that provides critical cloud connectivity. While there are multiple competitors vying for market share, only one – based on long-established worldwide standards – provides the infrastructure, dependability, security, and maturity required for widespread smart metre deployment. That’s cellular IoT in a nutshell. Adding cellular IoT to a smart metre used to be a difficult operation, but the PoC now shows how simple it is to install DLMS and LTE-M/NB-IoT connectivity and utilise it as a foundation for further development, testing, and optimization.
