Development Of Automatic Meter Reading System On Power Line

With the development of economy, the consumption of electrical power has greatly increased. Because of the great amount and widespread of the power consumers, the workload of meter reading becomes burdensome. Automatic Meter Reading System is a good solution for this problem. AMRS can help us reduce the workload of meter reading, improve work efficiency and realize the management automatization.At present, two schemes are applied in AMRS. The conventional scheme is based on the special transmission line. In this scheme, special transmission lines are laid to transmit the signals, which greatly enhance the stability of communication. However, the exorbitant cost of laying special lines and maintenance, great workload and difficulty in construction prevent it from popularization. The other scheme is based on the electrical power line, which makes use of the power line as transmission media. On the contrary to the former scheme, the overall cost of this scheme is fairly low, whereas, the stability of communication is unwarranted. Great intermittent noise, wide variety of impendence along with the load and great attenuation of signals have restricted the further utilization of power line.In allusion to the problem mentioned above, a new scheme is brought forward in this paper. Spread spectrum communication technology is applied in this scheme, which greatly improved the reliability of data transmission. Spread spectrum communication technology can be classified into four catalogs: Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum, Frequency Hopping, Time Hopping and Chirp. The Chirp technique can effectively spread the signals to the available frequency band with lowcost, it does not need pseudo-random code and can be used to implement Carrier Sense Multiple Access networks.This paper first introduces the fundamental principles of Chirp technique, and then discusses the hardware and software development of AMRS in detail. The performance analysis results of this system are also listed in the end of this paper.