An Effective Communication Performance Index for Advanced Metering Infrastructure

An effective Communication Performance Index (CPI) is proposed in this paper to evaluate and monitor the communication performance of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Reading success rate and response time acquired from a smart meter are used to design the proposed CPI. The CPIs for Data Concentrator Units (DCUs) and whole AMI can then be extended from meter CPIs. Test results for a small-scale AMI demonstrate the validity of proposed CPI. The proposed CPI can effectively supervise the communication quality and stability of AMI and would be helpful for the future deployment and operation of AMI.