A Review of the Topologies Used in Smart Water Meter Networks: A Wireless Sensor Network Application

Abstract

This paper presents several proposed and existing smart utility meter systems as well as their communication networks to identify the challenges of creating scalable smart water meter networks. Network simulations are performed on 3 network topologies (star, tree, and mesh) to determine their suitability for smart water meter networks. The simulations found that once a number of nodes threshold is exceeded the network’s delay increases dramatically regardless of implemented topology. This threshold is at a relatively low number of nodes (50) and the use of network topologies such as tree or mesh helps alleviate this problem and results in lower network delays. Further simulations found that the successful transmission of application layer packets in a 70-end node tree network can be improved by 212% when end nodes only transmit data to their nearest router node. The relationship between packet success rate and different packet sizes was also investigated and reducing the packet size with a factor of 16 resulted in either 156% or 300% increases in the amount of successfully received packets depending on the network setup.