Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Objectives: The proposed system addresses a fault tolerant technique to overcome the two major problems that are faced currently in the automated energy metering systems, used in telecom tower management. Methods/Analysis: It is analyzed that the effective supervision in the telecom tower sites, is currently affected due to the problem of SIM card interchange between the GSM/GPRS modems and IP connectivity failure between the GSM/GPRS modem and the server, in the automated energy metering system. Results: The fault tolerant technique addressed, utilizes a master GSM/GPRS modem which is capable of communicating with all the GSM/GPRS modems in the client side. Whenever the IP connectivity gets lost in any particular GSM/GPRS modem, the modem automatically sends the energy meter readings through SMS to the master GSM/GPRS modem, which in turn sends the data to the server via RS232 link. The problem of SIM card interchange in the GSM/GPRS modems is taken care by assigning an ID for each energy meter and the energy meter readings are mapped against this ID instead of mapping against the phone numbers. Improvements: There is not a single fault tolerant technique addressed for GSM/GPRS modems until today. These two automated solutions reduce the manual dependency and prevent most of the human prone errors. The system can further be improved by incorporating the security measures addressed for the GSM/GPRS modems and also the network failure of GSM modem (while receiving the SMS) can be addressed.
Keywords: Automated Energy Meter, Database, Fault Tolerant, GSM/GPRS Modem, IP Connectivity Failure, SIM Card