The aims and objectives of this thesis are to investigate remote electricity supply metering and load control in terms of the now availble UK Electricity Supply Industry (ESI) private and national telecommunications networks, the intelligent building, the home computer and domestic energy management concepts.

This work commences with an overview of private telecommunications systems utilised within the U.K. electricity supply industry together with those network services provided by Public Telecommunications Service Operators (PTO's) for customer access (Chapters 1 and 2). The thesis continues by describing the meter reading and billing processes (Chapter 3) and introduces the concepts of remote metering, the consumer billing interface (Chapters 4 and 5), load control and spot pricing theory (Chapter 6). A review of recent load control and remote metering field trials, conducted in the UK, including feasibility studies are then detailed (Chapter 7). A mathematical analysis of two basic approaches to the principle of 'idle-line' working is also considered (Chapter 7).

The 'intelligent home' concept and the customer billing interface are then considered in conjunction with the development of a 'home computer' applications strategy (Chapter 8). The development of text, communications and control simulation on the BBC microcomputer, are then detailed by reference to the 'Adaptive Microprocessor based System for Experimentation in the Transmission of Text' (AMTEXT) developed to test the feasibility of the home computer applications strategy developed in Chapter 8 (Chapter 9). The concept of 'idle-time working is then introduced coupled with the concept of 'integration' by way of the national telecommunications network services. Proposals for a Modular Integrated Data Aquisition System (MIDAS) are then considered as a means of illustrating a practical application of both integration and idle-time working (Chapter 10).

The thesis continues by considering network integrity, security and reliability in terms of network architecture and the development of a strategy for quantifying network resilience as a design parameter (Chapter 11).

Finally, the thesis concludes by summarisirig the work undertaken and the results obtained with respect to the initial objectives, and details potential areas for further research.

Telecommunications networks for remote electricity supply metering and load control

This paper describes the digital part of a simplex binary telemetry system for conveying control signals to some remote body such as a missile. The decoder in the remote body is small, light, has a low power consumption, and is designed to operate above a certain noise threshold. When the signal-to-noise ratio of the signal at the input to the decoder is low the latter only accepts information which has a high probability of being correct thereby causing the rejection of most of the transmitted information. When information is rejected the remote body functions on the data which were last accepted by the decoder.Both experimental and theoretical results are presented for error rate and received frame rate, and the effect of asymmetry in the binary channel is examined.

M. Aslam

Papers

Error-rate in a digital simplex telemetry system