AMI-SIM: An NS-2 Based Simulator for Advanced Metering Infrastructure Network

One of the main components of the smart grid is advanced metering infrastructure, which is responsible for delivering, concentrating and analyzing energy usage data. For an advanced metering infrastructure should cover extensive area like a city or a province, if organizing systems and lines were inadvertently chosen or their structure were not properly configured, they would generate huge waste of various resource or cause great damage to system itself. That’s why the simulation tool for large scale advanced metering infrastructure network is needed. In this paper, we defined requirements of advanced metering infrastructure network simulator useful for choosing proper system spec in given advanced metering infrastructure network topology, and proposed simulator designed to follow these requirements. The core engine of simulator is NS-2 but original NS-2 was modified to match our goal of simulation. Several tests were performed to evaluate if the performance of a node properly have an effect on simulation result, and to evaluate accuracy of capability usage degree calculation performed by simulator. These tests show that proposed simulator is available for practical use.