A Cloud-Based System Architecture for Advanced Metering in Smart Cities

Advanced meter infrastructures are changing the way smart metering is made, especially making use of computational tools such as machine learning techniques to improve data processing and analyses. In this work, we present a cloud-based system architecture for advanced electric metering in smart cities, whose purpose is to achieve better management of electric energy use by consumers and an efficient balance between demand and consumption by utilities. In our approach, in addition to energy consumption data (kilowatt-hour), other electrical parameters (e.g., current, power factor, active and reactive power) are collected in real-time from smart meters for storage and deeper analyses in a big data ecosystem. Moreover, we introduce the smart gateway (sGateway), a component of the system architecture to provide local processing and to simplify the communication between smart meters and the cloud processing system.