Development of Smart Energy Meter Based on LoRaWAN in Campus Area

Smart meters will increasingly replace conventional electric meters for offering many advantages including the ability for automatic reporting and eliminating the need for staff to do the door-to-door visit to read the meter. LoRaWAN can be one of the key promising technologies that offer long-range connectivity compared to conventional automatic meter reading systems. In this work, LoRaWAN-based smart energy meter was proposed to monitor the energy consumption in campus area. We designed the hardware implementation, payload format, and firmware for data acquisition and transmission using LoRa modulation. To evaluate the performance of the network under Indonesia regulation, we conducted two field tests. Our results showed that single gateway operated on eight channels was able to receive uplink packets within radius of 1.242 km in campus/urban area. From the field test, it also can be observed that using the omnidirectional antenna with VSWR close to 1 could achieve superior performance where the PER was less than 1. While using VSWR 3.2 degraded the PER performance to 13.77. © 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.