Author(s)

Hoi Yan Tung, Kim Fung Tsang, Hoi Ching Tung, Veseline Rakocevic, Kwok Tai Chui, Yat Wah Leung

1Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Department of SEEM, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China..
School of Engineering & Mathematical Science, City University London, London, UK.

A WiFi-ZigBee hybrid BAN solution, namely WiZBAN, is proposed and implemented to cater for the development of high traffic AMI for smart grid application. It is important to highlight that the major challenge of WiZBAN is to handle the high density environment which results in heavy traffic loading and weak signal propagation. To overcome the captioned problem, Vertical Backbone Communication (VBC) and Horizontal Floor Communication (HFC) are defined for WiZBAN. The WiZBAN consists of WiZBAN Gateway (WiZGW), WiZBAN Meter Hub (WiZBAN) and WiZBAN In Home Display (WiZIHD) which caters for the smart grids services including smart metering and demand response. The WiZGW is the entrance of WiZBAN and connects WiZBAN to utilities. The WiZGW also teams up with WiZMH to enables VBC. On the other hand, WiZMH serves as the interception point of VBC and HFC. It interacts with smart meters and sets up the HFC together with WiZIHD to provide the user interface for end users. To shorten the transmission time, WiFi is adopted for VBC while ZigBee is applied to HCF to overcome the weak signal propagation. To investigate the performance of WiZBAN, a case study has been conducted based on an existing 23 floor residential building. From the measured and simulated results, the average round trip delay of demand response and smart metering are found to be 0.6 s and 9 s respectively.

Advance Metering Infrastructure; Building Area Network; WiFi; ZigBee; Delay

H. Tung, K. Tsang, H. Tung, V. Rakocevic, K. Chui and Y. Leung, "A WiFi-ZigBee Building Area Network Design of High Traffics AMI for Smart Grid," Smart Grid and Renewable Energy, Vol. 3 No. 4, 2012, pp. 324-333. doi: 10.4236/sgre.2012.34043.