Unleasing Smart Cities efficient and sustainable

energy policies with IoT based Unbundled Smart

Meters
Mihai Sanduleac, Member IEEE,
ECRO S.R.L.
Bucharest, Romania
mihai.sanduleac@gmail.com

Catalin Lucian Chimirel, Student

Member IEEE, Mircea Eremia,
Senior Member IEEE, Lucian
Toma, Member IEEE
University Politehnica Bucharest,
Bucharest, Romania

Abstract This paper presents a straightforward solution for

supporting energy efficiency in Smart Cities, under multi-utility
ownership, role-based multi access of metering data, and data
privacy and security, by using the Unbundled Smart Meter
(USM) concept. Smart meters are placed at the connection point
of the customer with the network and is about to become the
most abundant equipment in active distribution networks.
Currently, the smart meters are usually accessed only by the
licensed utility for their maintenance, whereas other actors, like
the energy supplier and the customer, may have only a later
access to the energy information, which makes difficult their use
for developing energy efficient strategies. In order to allow
developing the Smart City, the smart meters must be capable of
acting as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, to facilitate the citizen
have easy and secure access to data, both locally and remote. The
USM architecture presented in this paper shows a reliable
solution for fulfilling all actors needs, and support developing
Smart Cities.
Keywords Unbundled Smart Meter (USM), Internet of
Things (IoT), Internet oriented Smart Meter (IoSM), Smart City
Platform (SCP).

I. THE UNBUNDLED SMART METER ARCHITECTURE

With the advent of hardware and software technologies it is
possible today to create new energy meters that are capable,
besides recording electrical energy, to determine power
quality indices, store data for a long period of time, as well as
to provide bidirectional communication with the utility [1].
The new meters are also capable of recording the electrical
energy on several time-of-use periods during a day, which
allows the utility to offer different time-of-use tariffs to the
customer. The possibility of achieving these functionalities
from a meter has determined the authorities, the
manufacturers, the electricity utilities, the consultants, a.s.o. to
plan investments for research and development.
All involved parties have benefits from the smart meters,
among which better use of generation by supporting the
renewable energy sources, lower costs with handling the data,
feedback for the utilities as regards the daily load profile,
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of European Unions
Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement
No 646184, and the Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources
Development 2007-2013 of the Ministry of European Funds through the
Financial Agreement POSDRU/159/1.5/S/132397.

Dorel Stanescu
Electrica S.A.
Bucharest, Romania

better load forecasting, demand response, avoid energy theft,

or higher customer satisfaction due to complete information
and exact invoices [2].
Although the new meters are generically called smart
meters, there is no standard configuration as regards the
functionalities. Both meters manufacturers and utilities offer
customized meters, while advanced metering infrastructures
have been developed and deployed in many countries [3]. But,
there is always an issue of cost.
According to Siemens [4], the buildings account for 40% of
the world energy consumption and for 21% for the total
greenhouse emissions. For these reasons, buildings are key
elements in the targets to reduce the energy consumption and
to
implement
sustainable
development
programs.
Implementation of advanced technologies and transforming
the buildings into manageable entities may help reducing the
greenhouse emissions by up to 40%. To achieve this, new
solutions of meter design and functionality are required to
allow developing the Smart Cities.
In this paper we present a new smart meter design, which
allow for customized functionalities and price. The meter
consists of compatible modules of different functionalities,
which may be added or removed any time. The modules are
thus integrated in an unbundled configuration, and the meter is
called Unbundled Smart Meter (USM). The proposed USM
architecture [5][8] is presented in Figure 1 and consists of the
following two main components:
a) Smart Metrology Meter (SMM), provided with
mandatory metrology features and functionality, dealing also
with hard real-time functionalities. The stored data cannot be
deleted in any other way than through buffer recirculation
after e.g. 6 months or 2 years (some of it being legally
relevant). This component is similar to the classical electricity
meter.
b) Smart Meter eXtension (SMX), which has high

flexibility to accommodate new functionalities that support

smart grid operation, provision of various energy services by
either supplier or the customer, multi-user management, or
multi-protocol communication with various actors directly
involved in electricity supply service to the end-user.

Fig. 1. Unbundled Smart Meter architecture.

This new meter is designed within the Nobel Grid European

project and is planned to be deployed by five demonstrators
across Europe that will test its flexibility in various situations,
among which at the metering points where the DSO, the endcustomers and Smart City authorities can contribute with the
purpose of improving energy efficiency.
In the paper we also present results from some first
deployments.
II. USM AS AN IOT DEVICE
USM is a complex equipment that can serve various actors
in many ways. It can become an Internet oriented Smart Meter
(IoSM) by integrating IoT features in the SMX module.
Compared with the already classical Smart Meters, which may
have IP connection for remote browsing and parameterization,
an IoSM needs to cope specifically with high requirements of
cyber-security as well as privacy and multi-user approach.
Some non-exhaustive requirements of an IoSM that can serve
multi-actors, including Smart City and end-user, are
summarizing as follows:
1) Accessibility through IP address (IPV4/6) with
visibility over internet, e.g. through Virtual Private Network
(VPN) endpoint, through direct access as server for services or
connecting to an Internet Protocol (IP) server to provide its
services;
2) Secure communication using strong encryption and
authentication, based on Key Management Infrastructure
(KMI) policies tailored for large deployments;
3) Multi-user functionality, by accepting many
simultaneous connections (e.g. the distribution system
operator DSO), the electricity service supplier, Smart
City/community, ESCOs, end-user);
4) Multi-protocol, e.g. Device Language Message
Specification (DLMS) for billing, IEC61850 for SCADA in
smart grids, publish-subscribe solutions for ESCOs;
5) Mitigation of at least three main roles in the IoSMs
SMX part (which is also the gateway to internet, with potential
vulnerability by default): the Smart Meter operator, which can

be usually the DSO; the prosumer/end-customer, which is the

legal owner of the meter data; and the Smart City authority.
This should be done in a hierarchical structure using new
technologies to allow the legal access and operation of the
meter .
6) Privacy by design, which allows the data to be
exchanged with authorized external agents only; a Role-based
Access Control (RBAC), employed to provide specific access
to various actors, is mandatory needed.
7) IoSM features, to act as a gateway, with firewall
functionality between the Smart Grid and the Smart Home
IoT, to support delivery of energy related services.
8) Intrusion detection, malware encapsulation and
firewalling.
9) Audit activity based logs of events and other specific
actions.
While the last two features are more or less general IT
recipes applied in all systems, the first seven features are a
result of both IT specific recipes and Smart Meters/Smart Grid
specific requirements.
III. USM DESIGN FOR MULTI-USER ACCES
The new USM is designed with complex functionalities at
the SMX level, and is capable to provide, besides the basic
billing, many other functions such as: Smart Grid
observability, by providing real-time instrumentation values
URMS(t), IRMS(t), P(t), Q(t), f(t) delivered by the SMM part of
the USM [7]; energy services measurement, by providing
interval metering down to 1 minute resolution, thus being
capable to support Demand Response and data aggregation for
higher power based ancillary services up to the TSO level;
power quality (PQ) indices; a high level support for security
and privacy. The latter are critical factors for Smart Grid
deployments and end-customer acceptability in large Smart
Meters roll-outs.
Smart Cities are developed gradually starting from
engaging small entities and expanding applications via cloud
based applications. In order to achieve massive integration of
citys energy behavior, Smart Cities need to have their own
strategy on the energy ecosystem of the community
The unbundled smart meter design is essential to develop
prosumer features at the end-user in form of smart homes or
smart buildings. At higher level, DSOs, energy suppliers or
aggregators are connected to the end-user and integrate it into
various smart grid applications.
Figure 2 suggests that the USM can be considered as an
energy gateway between the end-user and the smart city
applications.
At the community level, energy ecosystem based strategies
may be developed to support Smart Cities, but most of today
projects are limited in terms of deployment especially due to
users concern to give access to its data. Thereby, security and
privacy are barriers that have to be broken.

IV. DATA PRIVACY VERSUS OBSERVABILITY IN SMART CITIES

The security and privacy features are implemented in the
USM based on various measurements, especially at the SMX
level, which is exposed to communication with various actors
and need to address the already mentioned Role Based Access
Control (RBAC) technology.

Fig. 2: Smart City along other actors retrieving their needed data

Data privacy is an essential issue to be addressed when

dealing with energy metering. However, in order to perform
various end-user optimization, e.g. energy efficiency
measurements or to provide energy consilience, access to data
is a prerequisite.
There are different categories of consumers:
The buildings belonging to the municipality, which can
share energy related data in a transparency way;
Industrial/commercial buildings, which usually require
privacy;
Buildings for public use not belonging to municipality,
such as big malls;
Residential buildings, where the privacy is extremely
sensitive; these form the majority of consumers.
Most of the today proof-of-concept projects have shown
willingness of people to share data with other partners than
those stipulated by the contractual obligations, such as the

DSO and the energy supplier. The end-user needs proofs that
its data is safely and not used in a malicious way. On the other
hand, the end-user needs to see regular statistics showing that
the data accessed from its meter and the services it provides
brings the expected benefits.
Figure 3 shows the complexity of using data in the context
of legal access based on country rules and/or contracts or
agreements. The relationships regulated by the national
authorities are marked in red and the non-regulated ones (based
on voluntary contracts or agreements) are in blue. Each legal
arrangement has a different retention/privacy profile. In order
to show the complexity of the problem and also to give the
ground for our proposed solution, the arrangements depicted in
the picture are explained in detail as follows:
The distribution system operator (DSO) collects as
mandatory the meters active energy load profiles on intervals
down to 60 or 15 minutes. These are usually required for
calculating classes of specific load profiles, which are
necessary for network design and enforcement. As an option,
in order to completely preserve privacy, these classes of LPs
can be calculated in USM, and only the 20-30 specific classes
can be provided to DSO. Moreover, the DSO can read, the
meter allows based on mandatory obligations, power quality
data such as voltage level records and power supply failures.
Real-time data is not mandatory but can be obtained based on a
separate agreement, accompanied by privacy measures such as
anonymization. Clear data retention time policies are needed
for any data collection type.
The energy supplier needs billing data from the meter,
which can be retrieved directly (as in Figure 3) or via the same
DSO, which is usually responsible for operating basic
functionalities of the meter; there are mandatory contracts for
collecting this data because they are necessary for the supplier
activity.
The municipalities are interested in developing Smart City
environments, where electricity is one of the most important

Fig. 3. Handling different mandatory and non-mandatory access from three different actors: DSO, power supplier and Smart City.

vectors. Figure 4 suggests the way in which the agreements

with the municipality for the categories of consumers listed
above.
As already mentioned, from the perspective of a residential
consumer there are always concerns about privacy. Usually the
meters data are collected by the DSO only, then the data may
eventually be resent the Smart City applications, thereby there
is a high concern about the fact that there is a third party in
between the user and the municipality. Figure 3 provides a
solution for implementation into the USM concept that
supports a direct data transfer from the user to the Smart City
Platform SCP (and not to the AMR of the DSO), such as realtime data or fine grained LPs (e.g. each 1 minute). In this way,
when a residential consumer (or prosumer) enters in a citizen
agreement with municipality to help achieving energy
efficiency goals, both real-time data and fine grained LPs can
be used without delays, and various privacy solutions can be
included, such as anonymization at the meter level and/or at
neighborhood level.
One way of achieving anonymization is by network or
neighborhood segmentation. Summation of data from multiple
end-customers, e.g. at least ten, may be sufficient to preserve
data privacy [9]. Figure 4 shows an example of aggregation of
active and reactive powers (P and Q) on geographic
segments. The advantage of network segmentation can be used
by the DSO as well to improve observability in active
networks. The eventual power generation of the individual
prosumers may be or may be not anonymized, as usually it
does not show personal life information.

The idea of data segmentation shown in Figure 4 was

applied into a real low voltage network. Based on the
aggregated loads (P and Q), small scale load profiles can be
created. Additionally, for market purposes, generation profiles
(P_PV) are also created. This procedure will not affect in any
way Smart Grid observability deployed at MV/LV dispatch
centers, because the configuration of the network remains
unmodified.
V.

UNBUNDLE SMART METER IMPLEMENTED IN A SMART

CITY

The proposed solution for developing the unbundle meter

concept and handling data while preserving anonymization and
privacy was applied into the City of Sibiu, located in a central
area of Romania. Several projects were initiated to transform
Sibiu into a smart city, including smart metering and energy
efficiency.
A. Anonimization and data privacy by segmentation
Within this setup, data aggregation is performed for at least
ten end-customers based on the principle suggested in Figure 4.
The network observability over a segment of aggregated
consumers preserves privacy as it is now much more difficult
to associate an action to a specific user. The solution
implemented in Sibiu is in line with the level of minimum
aggregation (more than 7-8) recommended in [8], regarding
Data Handling, Data Safety, and Consumer Protection.
Figure 5 shows the load profile of an individual consumer
(blue curve) and the load profile of a segment of 10 consumers
(red curve). It is clear that specific activity of individual
consumers, such as no-load periods, are hidden when data is
aggregated for several consumers, which ensures, on the other
hand data privacy.
This solution can be extrapolated for demand response
services, but clear agreements, such as the data to be handled
and the data retention time, should be included in the service
contract.

Fig. 4. Anonymized consumptions or production through VPP aggregation

The active and reactive power aggregation on network

segments has additional advantage. Power flow analysis

Fig. 5. Records of private data of end-consumer (un-acceptable for SCADA observability versus aggregated power of 10 daily load profiles.

remains feasible by transposition of data associated to classical

network lines and buses using simple /T or transformations.
However, we have to assume that the network segments are
symmetrical, with powers of both total consumption and
generation distributed equally over the three phases.
Figure 6 shows an example of Human Machine Interface for
the case studied, where it is obvious that aggregated active
powers in the neighborhoods raise no privacy concerns.

Fig. 6. Aggregated active power load and voltage levels in a Smart City

The load profile of a municipality building can be seen as a

transparent information, thus the energy profile is available
and transparent to the citizens. Figure 7 shows the profile of a
municipality consumption over 24 hours, in fine grained
resolution (each one minute E+1m) as well as in 15 minutes
average power resolution (E+15m).

Fig. 7. Power profile of the municipality measured with USM over 24 hours

Figure 8 illustrates a separation between public buildings

and private buildings. In the smart city project applied to the
city of Sibiu, a clear separation was done in this regard.
Besides electrical energy, the project includes monitoring of
other utilities and services, starting with thermal energy
monitoring.
The Smart Grid observability solution is purely based on
USM devices, allowing important operation and control
functions over the entire MV/LV network without additional
equipment, based on a sole massive deployment of Smart
Meters in the grid, addressing billing data, SCADA
observability and Demand Response / Distributed Energy
Resources control (e.g. PV / inverter) for grid active control.
B. Power quality assessment
Power quality is an important characteristic of the energy
supply service, especially for the end-consumer. In a smart
city, quality is very important, thus the municipality is also
interested in receiving PQ monitoring data from city utilities.
With the capabilities of USM to provide second(s)-based
voltage related information, there are great opportunities not
only to provide observability to a dispatch center of the DSO
as a first functionality, but also to assess power quality based
on these local measurements and records inside the Unbundled

Fig. 8. Smart City power aggregation for delivering services to citizens

Smart Meter.
Figure 9 shows the voltage profile in a metering point of the
Sibiu municipality over 24 hours.

The multi-user access capability of the USM enables

developing various applications, from the individual endconsumer, to the distribution system operator, then at higher
level to city municipalities. Thereby, it enables Smart City
applications in addition to DSO related functionalities.
Smart City observability, as regards the load profiles, can
be more easily achieved, while preserving customer privacy.
This is possible when data from at least 10 users are
aggregated, either in real-time or for a longer period.

Fig. 9. Voltage level measured with USM over 24 hours in an LV network.

The degree of detail of the data is high enough so that

statistical analysis can be performed [6][10][11]. Note that the
SMX part of an USM is responsible for long term records and
is also capable to store second-based rms voltage records for
more than three months.
C. Smart City Services for Citizens
The need for energy behavior observability has as one of its
main reasons the delivery of coherent data to the Smart city.
One of the Smart Cities objectives is to raise the energy
awareness among its citizens. Energy consumption and
generation organized on different categories and zones are
very important to show how clean and efficient is the city
from different perspective, as well as to calculate key
performance indicators (KPIs) that describe the city energy
behavior. These are considered as possible services for the city
communities. Figure 8 above presents the Smart City concept
tailored for the municipality of Sibiu. It can be seen that
several aggregations are specifically relevant, such as total
energy consumption of the city, neighborhood consumption,
aggregation of public buildings, etc. Such approach gives also
a good ground for comparing KPIs of different neighborhoods.
Al these have been possible with the help of unbundled
smart meters that collect data at various points, data that can be
accessed in a multi-user approach.
We consider that the proposed solution for energy metering
supports a sustainable and flexible development of Smart Cities
in terms of energy aspects. On this way the authors express
their gratitude to Sibiu municipality for its support.
VI. CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents a solution for unleashing Smart services
for the citizens, by using unbundle smart meters as main and
ubiquitous equipment, which provides various capabilities or
enables various applications, such as:

With the small and cheap additional module (the Smart

Meter eXtension), the USM is capable to provide power quality
indicators based on fine-grained measurements of rms voltages.
The test have been performed for developing a smart city
environment in Sibiu.
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