Wireless monitoring and management of energy consumption and power quality events

Abstract

This paper describes the design, implementation and testing of a distributed wireless system conceived for residential consumers which allows remote monitoring of energy consumption and power quality events from multiple electrical appliances. The system can be operated by the user from a central computer, which receives the collected data from a wireless sensor network based on the IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee standards. The development of the system involved the design and implementation of the hardware of the wireless sensor nodes; the software embedded in the network nodes, which manages the acquisition and transmission of data from the sensor nodes to the computer; as well as the user interface software in the central computer. Performance tests show that the developed prototype is able to provide measurements with very good accuracy and precision, for both voltage and current.