An RFID-based power meter and outage recording system

Abstract

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is looked upon as one of the top ten important technologies of the twentieth century. In coming years, public area applications are the key issue in developing RFID. Power systems are innately bulky, large, and definitely, an extremely important application area for RFID. In power areas, RFID has great potential to be applied extensively to customers. Therefore, an RFID-based power meter and outage recording system is proposed in this article. The proposed system can be used to fully collect and record power consumption data and power reliability information on customers. A small-scale power meter and outage recorder is designed first and then an RFID system is designed and embedded into the power meter and employed to record the power data in tags. A handheld meter management system is also designed in this article to collect the data stored in the tags and synchronize the collected data with rear-end processing if necessary. Due to the uniqueness of RFID tags, the power consumption data and outage information on customers can be recorded and then identified in a rear-end processing system. Experimental results show the validity of the proposed system.

Keywords:

• radio frequency identification
• RFID tag
• power meter
• outage recording system
• rear-end processing system
• handheld meter management system

Acknowledgments

This study was sponsored by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under research grant NSC 96-2221-E-230-026-MY2.