The Nakano Broadway shopping arcade in Nakano Ward, Tokyo, is home to several hundred shops including second-hand manga bookstore Mandarake. This large-scale commercial facility, built back in the 60s, is now installing a state-of-the-art wireless sensor network system.
The Nakano Broadway Management Association of Japan began operating a remote meter-reading system using wireless technology for about 1200 electric power and water meters, from April 2010 (Fig.1). The Association will use a wireless network to collect per-tenant data on energy and water usage for the commercial areas of the Nakano Broadway Center Building (built 1966), from the B1 to 4th floors. A dedicated server is used to store meter readings every thirty minutes, with data utilized to manage monthly electricity billing and monitor usage status. The Association plans to leverage the data to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions.
The Nakano Broadway Center Building purchases its electricity from the Tokyo Electric Power Co., Inc. of Japan under a batch contract, running it through transformer equipment in the basement for supply to individual building tenants. As a result, the Association itself is responsible for tracking and billing electric power consumption. Until now, Association personnel have visually read meters, but the task was exceedingly difficult. A source at the Association explains, "The meters are installed off the back corners of storage rooms or blocked by shipping cartons, making visual meter reading really tough. And if the store is closed that day or the person you need to talk isn't there, it means more delay. It usually takes about ten days to read them all."
To resolve the problem, the Association began investigating the potential for installing an automatic meter reading system a few years ago, as it was time to replace meters anyway. Environmental regulations affecting commercial facilities in Tokyo were also changing at that time, with new restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and revisions to the Act on the Rational Use of Energy spurring the adoption of energy management systems. "We felt we had to accurately track energy usage to be able to cope with future energy-saving regulations, and that meant installing a real management system," explained a source at the Association. At the end of 2009 their proposal was funded as a next-generation building control technology standardization demonstration project by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) of Japan, providing timely financing for system introduction.
The installed system consists of wireless terminals connected to about 1200 meters, wireless relays, and the data monitoring system (Fig.2). A single wireless terminal is connected to several dozen watt-hour and water meters, collecting readings from the all. About forty of these terminals are situated throughout the building, with communication between them implemented using a multi-hop protocol in the 2.4GHz band. Acquired data is passed to the data monitoring system sequentially. The received data is then stored to a dedicated PC server, as well as being displayed in realtime on a dedicated monitor so operators can monitor current usage.
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