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In today’s competitive world, the power and energy sector of any country plays a major role in the growth of domestic, industrial, agricultural, telecommunication, and education sectors. Electricity is the crucial requirement for living a comfortable life and it has to be properly used and managed, especially in cloud data centers that have become central to computing. The electrical metering instrument technology has come a long way from what it was more than 100 years ago. From originally bulky meters with heavy magnets and coils, there have been many innovations that have resulted in size and weight reduction and also, improvement in features and specifications of meters. An electric meter or energy meter is a device that measures the amount of electrical energy supplied or consumed by a residence, business or machine. The most common type is a kilowatt hour meter. When used in electricity retailing, the utilities record the values measured by these meters to generate an invoice for the electricity consumed. They may also record other variables including the time when the electricity was used.
Modern electricity meters operate by continuously measuring the instantaneous voltage (volts) and current (amperes) and finding the product of these to give instantaneous electrical power (watts) which is then integrated against time to give energy used (joules, kilowatt-hours etc.). The meters fall into two basic categories namely the electromechanical meter and the electronic meters. The most common type of electricity meter is the Thomson or electromechanical induction watt-hour meter, invented by Elihu Thomson in 1888. Resolution and accuracy of the meter have seen substantial improvements over the years (Arun et. al., 2013). Presently, microcontrollers are playing a major role in metering instrument technology. The Automatic Meter Reading system is intended to remotely collect the meter readings of a locality using a communication system, without persons physically going and reading the meters visually. The technology of e-metering (Electronic Metering) has gone through rapid technological advancements and there is increased demand for a reliable and efficient Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) system (Arun et. al.., 2013: Kulkhani 2012). One of the proposed methods for AMR system is based on Global System Mobile (GSM).
Global System Mobile (GSM)
GSM is a second generation cellular system standard. A GSM based wireless communication module is integrated with an electronic energy meter of each entity to have remote access over the usage of electricity. A GSM channel is a very useful means of communication, as sending data as Short Messaging Service (SMS) turns out to be a very handy tool due to its good area coverage capability and cost effectiveness. GSM networks operate in four different frequency ranges. Most GSM networks operate in the 900 MHz or 1800 MHz bands. Some countries in the Americas use the 850 MHz and 1900 MHz bands because the 900 and 1800 MHz frequency bands were already allocated. The rarer 400 and 450 MHz frequency bands are assigned in some countries, where these frequencies were previously used for first-generation systems (ETS 300 502 1994).