A Low Cost and Low Power Consumption Automatic Water Meter Reading System: Hardware Investigation and Network Design

This paper presents a low power consumption and low cost automatic data collection network for water meter application. Based on transmission performance and power consumption, several low cost sub-GHz wireless transceivers are analyzed and compared, and consequently a suitable hardware is chosen. The associated network protocol stack is also examined. To construct the automatic collecting data mechanism, we consider a cluster based wireless sensor network (WSN) where routers and a GPRS gateway are used to link each cluster to a data collection center. Advantages of this proposed configuration are the simple implementation, low cost and low power consumption. By using the Monte Carlo simulation technique, packet delivery ratio and power consumption for different topologies are investigated. Based on obtained results, the optimum network topology for automatic water meter reading in a typical urban environment is finally proposed