IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2021 - 84

Special Section on Advances in Smart Cities
cell-phones in any time, and to pay for bills conveniently.
The smart grid and smart metering is a
good solution to reduce power dissipation by promotion
of power supply management. The smart
grid is a technology combining sensing equipments
and control technology for remote
resource management and application. Thesmart
metering system requires the sensors, hardware/
software control, and communication capabilities.
Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI)3 is
implemented with utility distribution networks,
as a main bone for the development of smart cities.
Smart electric, gas, and water meters are a
part of AMI system, however, these devices
require batteries to keep working when line
power is interrupted temporarily. Constructing
AMI system is very complex and costly. Currently,
to reduce the constructing cost, the existing
global systems for mobile (GSM)communications
can be used to send and receive the meter data.4
The water meters are used to record the
degree of water flow. The degree of water meter
is recorded by inspector with the conventional
mechanical meter, which requires many human
powers. Recently, the electrical water meter is
used. The pulse for electrical water meter data is
available in the market.5 The smart meter can
connect to IoT environment via WiFi for remote
control and Sandbox is used for servo.6 In order
to record the degree of meter, the power must
be supplied to the electrical meter for all time.
Hence, this kind of meter wastes energy. To save
the power dissipation, the optical detection is
used to read the conventional water meter.7
This method supplies the power to the meter
while only for data reading. The camera is used
to catch the digital images of water meter, then
to recognize the digitals with learning based.
Many well-known neural networks, such as
ResNet, GoogleNet, are tried to attain better
results. However, the accuracy is not very excellent.
The learning approaches also require high
computational cost, which is away from the
practical low-cost meter application.
Our previous paper had designed a smart
water meter with hybrid approach.8,9 The power
is supplied to the meter only for reading, which
can save the power dissipation. The digit detection
accuracy can achieve to 97% to meet the
practical applications. The hybrid-electrical
84
Figure 1. Framework of the proposed system.
meter is not only low computational cost but
also high accuracy. In this article, we are interested
at data transmission and correction, software
water management to construct the smart
control system with the proposed water meter.
The water leakage detection method is also
developed with software management.
SYSTEM FRAMEWORK
In this article, an automatic meter readings
system for water flow is presented. Figure 1
shows the architecture of entire system. The
main includes two parts: servo end and client
end. The client end includes digital meters, data
collector, GSM/4G module. Servo end includes
control center, database, GSM/4G module, software
control with computers. This system is bidirectional
communication between the servo and
clients. Based on the GSM system, the servo
transmits the command to smart meters and
then read the meter data from the clients. The
transmitted data may be errors during the communication
channel. The software verification is
used to check the data whether it is correct. The
meter data are uploaded to the cloud servo. The
cloud computing is used to verify the meter data.
Data collector is at the client end, which is as a
control kernel of dataset. There are many leafnodes
with smart meters at the terminals. The
microprocessor with software programming is
designed to collect the readings of a group of
meters. The processor collects all the terminal
data, and then will be packed with the specified
format for data transmission. The packed data is
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2021
