Quietly, under the radar of the general public and most embedded product designers, there is a new gold rush. The market for Automated Meter Reading (AMR) solutions is about to go critical. Spiraling energy costs and vote winning green policies see the drive by governments worldwide to legislate towards mandatory provision of AMR with a long-term plan to move to a fully Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI).
In the months ahead many companies who are not usually associated with traditional metering are positioning themselves using product demonstrations and field trials to attempt to join this emerging market. With its experience in the microcontroller market, Cambridge-based semiconductor company, Cyan, has been witness to long-established metering companies in North America, China, Europe, India and South America recently going head to head with new players and design consultants to win a share in this growing marketplace.
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For embedded systems designers attempting to win business in this emerging market, it is necessary to source as much outside help as possible in order to provide cost effective real world working solutions for the difficult task of reading electric, gas and water meters automatically. Technologies involved are competing and emerging wireless standards for nodes embedded within existing or new meter designs and Ethernet, GPRS or power line communications for back haul communications for gateway concentrators. The foundation of all these systems is the microcontroller. Therefore, it is apparent that the race is on to create reliable working solutions in a very fluid marketplace.
Gateways
Focusing on gateways and concentrators, a typical AMR infrastructure will have one gateway device for every ten or twenty wireless meters. It is optimized to collect readings from the meters under its influence and transfer these readings back to a central server at regular intervals for logging and billing purposes.
Designing a gateway is a non-trivial task. Firstly, there must be integration of radio hardware and a radio protocol to communicate with the meter nodes. Current leading solutions are the Wireless MBUS, Wireless HART, ZigBee and other public or proprietary networks. Embedded designers must also choose the back haul link between gateway and server. Ethernet, GPRS or power line communications are often seen as good choices, however, it is costly and overkill to integrate all three into one complete solution. Complexities are many, for instance, choosing Ethernet would mean the designers have to integrate a TCP/IP stack and possibly an embedded web server and these will have to co-exist with the radio stack to communicate with the wireless meter nodes. Often, the usage of the radio stack will have time critical requirements on the microcontroller. The design issues increase exponentially.
It is no surprise that many gateway designers see 32-bit microcontrollers as being a safe bet for gateway products. This could be a grave mistake as companies risk designs falling by the wayside especially when you consider that in the gateway product market alone, there will be tens of millions of units worldwide. Multiplying the cost savings of using a 16-bit microcontroller over a 32-bit microcontroller offers significant financial benefits. A key focus in this market space will be total cost of ownership. Who would want to pay for unused processing cycles on every unit shipped when in the hands of experienced engineers, a tightly specified 16-bit device is perfectly adequate for producing excellent gateway products?
Given inbuilt Ethernet hardware, fast clock speed, very low power and a generous amount of Flash memory a 16-bit device from suppliers such as Cyan, may well out perform a 32-bit device in this market sector on the price vs performance graph. It is evident that an Ethernet Gateway solution for Wireless Metering can provide back channel connectivity, linking the RF metering infrastructure network to the utility company via the Internet. The inclusion of USB within the gateway can provide additional standard peripheral capability and connectivity, including a standard memory card connector.
RF Technologies
The choice of which RF technology to use when designing a gateway is far from easy, no standard has emerged as a winner in the AMR market, to date. With these technical factors in mind, Cyan has engineered a range of board level gateway solutions. These ready-to-go solutions including free software system design environment, CyanIDE, permit users to easily incorporate a stable gateway module platform into a wireless network. The integration of a selection of radio protocol stacks with a TCP/IP stack and web server, supporting a variety of radio hardware means that it is quick to move between competing emerging radio standards and back haul communications methods. Within the Cy-Solved brand, Cyan provide a range of Ethernet to RF gateway solutions, allowing the system integrator to choose and easily move between ZigBee, Wireless MBUS and other proprietary ISM band RF mesh network protocols, as market demands change and shift.
Another critical design feature which must be considered when engineering a wireless AMR network, is to ensure the code is free of ongoing royalty and free for designers to modify further into their own product space. This ultimately removes the risk of only using one of the emerging wireless solutions. Cyan has found that integration of Open Source software, where possible, allows prototypes and demonstrations to be produced quickly using system level design and programming tools, such as CyanIDE, allowing engineers to move between emerging radio standards while they continue to develop their product and the market solidifies. This is a more cost effective solution, as it permits greater customization of products and companies to be more flexible during the design process.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the winners in the AMR gateway market will be those providers that can bring new product to market quickly and effectively. It will be those that can best adapt their solutions to fast changing specifications and emerging RF standards in a cost effective way. It will be those designers whose solutions are not only technically excellent and rock solid reliable but those that offer the best price performance in a market that is expected to be tremendously competitive on system cost.