Reliable Reception of Wireless Metering Data with Protocol Coding

TL;DR

This paper proposes a protocol coding method using deterministic packet intervals to improve the reliable reception of wireless metering data under harsh channel conditions, addressing the challenge of pairing packets from multiple meters.

Contribution

It introduces a novel packet pairing approach based on deterministic intervals and analyzes its false pairing probability, validated through simulations and real-world experiments.

Findings

Over 15% of pairings are erroneous, indicating the upper bound for reliable meter data recovery.

The proposed method enhances the ability to recover data from multiple meters in challenging environments.

Simulation and experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the pairing strategy.

Abstract

Stationary collectors reading wireless, battery powered smart meters, often operate in harsh channel conditions to cut network installation cost to a minimum, challenging the individual link to each meter. The desired performance measure is reliable reception of at least some data from as many as possible meters, rather than increasing the fraction of received packets from one meter. As a first step for improving reliable reception, and motivated by the recent revision of Wireless M-Bus, we propose the use of a deterministic packet transmission interval to group packets from the same meter. We derive the probability of falsely pairing packets from different senders in the simple case of no channel errors, and show through simulation and data from an experimental deployment the probability of false pairing with channel errors. The pairing is an essential step towards recovery of metering data from as many as possible meters under harsh channel conditions. From the experiment we find that more than 15% of all conducted pairings are between two erroneous packets, which sets an upper bound on the number of additional meters that can be reliably recovered.