Routing and Reliability Improvements in WM-Bus protocol for smart cities

In a smart city, accounting information such as gas and electricity usage is gathered by meter nodes and sent to the collector node. A trade-off between the location of meters and the best quality communication signal is often needed and difficult to achieve for urban constraints and other communication signals. Meters can have limited resources such as memories and CPU. The thesis presents two routing extensions of the WM- Bus which is an open standard protocol for smart metering systems for improved performance and routing in a dense mesh utility network. The former extension is called NARUN: Noise Adaptive Routing in Utility Net- works. In NARUN, the collector calculates the path with the least noise to reach the destination meter. A weighted network graph that shows the connections among me- ters is used, where an edge weight defines the link failure index. No control messages are used to keep the weights updated. Meters report link failure index back to the collector by means of ordinary reading messages. The latter extension is NARUN-PC: NARUN with path cache. NARUN-PC ex- tends NARUN by introducing a caching strategy in the collector node. This thesis presents models and simulations of these two extensions. Performances have been evaluated in a real-life topology where a subset of the edges is affected by different levels of noise. Results show that NARUN has the lowest failure rate and traffic compared to the DSR protocol when the noise power is higher than -73 dBm. NARUN-PC decreases the traffic load and failure rate with respect to NARUN when the noise power is higher than -73 dBm

Innovative Concepts and Applications for Smart Water Cities

Smart cities are emerging worldwide, including economic, institutional, social, and technical concepts in interaction with existing infrastructure to achieve sustainability and increase quality of life. Additionally, digitalisation projects in the field of urban water infrastructure (UWI) aim to increase capacity of existing infrastructure to deal with future challenges caused by climate change, growing of urban population, and maintenance. Therefore, efficient and reliable information- and communication technologies (ICT) represent a key factor for the exchange of measurement data (e.g., monitoring environmental parameters) and interconnections between different participants. However, ICT and system-wide management are not yet widely deployed and mainly concentrated on main points in network-based UWI (e.g., combined sewer overflows, inlet point of district meter areas). In this context, especially the Internet of Things (IoT) concepts enables a large-scale implementation of measurement devices even at underground and remote structures, increasing data availability significantly. Following, new possibilities in the management of network-based UWI are emerging. The research aim of this doctoral dissertation is to contribute to the ongoing development of smart water cities by developing innovative concepts in the field of urban drainage and water distribution network including nature-based solutions

Enhancing the efficiency of electricity utilization through home energy management systems within the smart grid framework

The concept behind smart grids is the aggregation of “intelligence” into the grid, whether through communication systems technologies that allow broadcast/data reception in real-time, or through monitoring and systems control in an autonomous way. With respect to the technological advancements, in recent years there has been a significant increment in devices and new strategies for the implementation of smart buildings/homes, due to the growing awareness of society in relation to environmental concerns and higher energy costs, so that energy efficiency improvements can provide real gains within modern society. In this perspective, the end-users are seen as active players with the ability to manage their energy resources, for example, microproduction units, domestic loads, electric vehicles and their participation in demand response events. This thesis is focused on identifying application areas where such technologies could bring benefits for their applicability, such as the case of wireless networks, considering the positive and negative points of each protocol available in the market. Moreover, this thesis provides an evaluation of dynamic prices of electricity and peak power, using as an example a system with electric vehicles and energy storage, supported by mixed-integer linear programming, within residential energy management. This thesis will also develop a power measuring prototype designed to process and determine the main electrical measurements and quantify the electrical load connected to a low voltage alternating current system. Finally, two cases studies are proposed regarding the application of model predictive control and thermal regulation for domestic applications with cooling requirements, allowing to minimize energy consumption, considering the restrictions of demand, load and acclimatization in the system

Insights from the Inventory of Smart Grid Projects in Europe: 2012 Update

By the end of 2010 the Joint Research Centre, the European Commission’s in-house science service, launched the first comprehensive inventory of smart grid projects in Europe1. The final catalogue was published in July 2011 and included 219 smart grid and smart metering projects from the EU-28 member states, Switzerland and Norway. The participation of the project coordinators and the reception of the report by the smart grid community were extremely positive. Due to its success, the European Commission decided that the project inventory would be carried out on a regular basis so as to constantly update the picture of smart grid developments in Europe and keep track of lessons learnt and of challenges and opportunities. For this, a new on-line questionnaire was launched in March 2012 and information on projects collected up to September 2012. At the same time an extensive search of project information on the internet and through cooperation links with other European research organizations was conducted. The resulting final database is the most up to date and comprehensive inventory of smart grids and smart metering projects in Europe, including a total of 281 smart grid projects and 90 smart metering pilot projects and rollouts from the same 30 countries that were included in the 2011 inventory database. Projects surveyed were classified into three categories: R&D, demonstration or pre-deployment) and deployment, and for the first time a distinction between smart grid and smart metering projects was made. The following is an insight into the 2012 report.JRC.F.3-Energy securit

A Secure Lightweight Wireless M-Bus Protocol for IoT: Leveraging the Noise Protocol Framework

The expansion of smart metering within the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem underscores the need for robust security protocols that safeguard data transmission while optimizing device efficiency. Wireless Meter-Bus (wM-Bus), a key protocol for remote meter reading in utility systems such as gas, water, and heat meters, faces significant security challenges. This dissertation introduces a method to enhance wM-Bus security by integrating the Noise Protocol Framework (NPF), which secures wM-Bus against vulnerabilities and optimizes for the energy constraints of IoT devices. Initially examining wM-Bus security issues, particularly in battery-operated smart meters, the study explores the NPF’s lightweight, adaptable security solutions. Implementation analysis focuses on NPF handshake patterns NX (non-interactive with public key transmission by the initiator) and XX (mutual public key exchange), assessing their compatibility with wM-Bus through metrics such as memory use, packet size, and handshake time. Findings reveal that these patterns significantly outperform traditional methods like Transport Layer Security (TLS) in reducing energy consumption, thereby extending IoT devices’ operational lifespan. The study achieved a 5\% battery-life reduction with NX and a 25\% battery-life reduction with XX, enhancing both security and efficiency. These implementations also improved system security by reducing handshake times by up to 4.7\% and minimizing packet sizes by up to 68.38\%, critical for mitigating security threats. They also showed improvement in memory consumption compared to TLS. The proposed lightweight protocol effectively balances advanced security and efficiency, maintaining data confidentiality, integrity, and availability in smart metering without sacrificing performance. Security testing against the Spoofing, Tampering, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service, and Elevation of Privilege (STRIDE) model confirmed the resilience of this new protocol, thereby enhancing the security framework. This research not only establishes a more secure foundation for smart metering but also sets a precedent for future studies on integrating lightweight cryptographic frameworks in IoT environments

M-Bus in building automation

Práce se věnuje sběrnici M-Bus (Meter Bus), což je průmyslová sběrnice pro přenos údajů o spotřebě energií a stavových veličinách prostředí v systémech automatizace budov. Tento dokument popisuje princip přenosu signálu, protokol této sběrnice, způsoby zapojení, typy komponentů, bezdrátovou variantu a podává zhodnocení technologie M-Bus a srovnání s jejími alternativami.This thesis is about the M-Bus (Meter Bus), which is the industrial bus for the energy consumption data and the state values transmission in the building automation systems. This document describes signal transmission principle, M-Bus protocol, network topology, the types of components, the M-Bus wireless version and also provides summary of the M-Bus technology and the comparison with its alternatives.

Demand Response in Smart Grids

The Special Issue “Demand Response in Smart Grids” includes 11 papers on a variety of topics. The success of this Special Issue demonstrates the relevance of demand response programs and events in the operation of power and energy systems at both the distribution level and at the wide power system level. This reprint addresses the design, implementation, and operation of demand response programs, with focus on methods and techniques to achieve an optimized operation as well as on the electricity consumer

Influencia de los sistemas de gestión técnica de las instalaciones (domótica) en la calificación energética de los edificios

Programa Oficial de Doutoramento en Enerxía e Propulsión Mariña. 5014P01[Resumen] El estudio del impacto de la gestión técnica de las instalaciones en la certificación energética de los edificios es la base de esta tesis. Durante su desarrollo se observaron las desviaciones existentes entre datos obtenidos de medición en edificios reales y valores estimados con los resultados de sus certificaciones energéticas. Algunos de estos resultados, mejoran las expectativas, pudiendo clasificar edificios con sistema de regulación y control “domótico” y edificios con una regulación convencional. Con los resultados y el análisis de las posibles influencias externas mediante método de Montecarlo, se ha obtenido una metodología de modelización de los edificios, que nos permite optimizar de manera energética o económica las medidas de mejora a aplicar