Axiros Product Description

AXPERIENCE Smart Metering

Data Sheet
Combining AMI/AMR with Customer Experience Management

Axiros GmbH

Altlaufstr. 34
85635 Munich Hoehenkirchen
Germany

T +49 8102 80655 - 00

F +49 8102 80655 - 01
www.axiros.com
info@axiros.com

Axiros Glbal Salesl

Italy
Piazza Borromeo. 14
20123 Milan

T +39 02 8312 4300

F +39 02 8312 4301
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 AXPERIENCE Smart metering
Product Description

Purpose
smart metering

Axiros is already an established supplier of device management solution in the Telco and
Enterprise domain. Quite recently the AXPERIENCE product has been added to the Axiros
portfolio to complement the CRM/O&M solutions for Device Management with a set of
services completely dedicated to the M2M - machine to machine - industry. In this eco-
system Axiros is willing to bring the experience coming from almost a decade in device
management and QoS/QoE solutions.

The AXPERIENCE product for smart metering brings the native functionality related to the
collection of the metering data, configuration of the metering device, management of
different uplinks, data consolidation, aggregation and enrichment and handling of the
different device profiles and data models.

The AXPERIENCE solution comes with native support for the DLMS/COSEM protocol to
perform the MDM function; in addition to that - and depending on the customer
requirements - Axiros can deliver also a client / server solution that allows managament of
these devices that cannot support the DLMS/COSEM protocols.

Overview of Server only Solution

￭ Native support of DLMS/COSEM

￭ MySQL database backend

￭ Choice for other SQL back-ends depending on customer requests

￭ Full SOA compliant northbound interface for data exchange

￭ Internal workflow management system - to define automatic multiple steps interactions

with device

￭ Automatic initial configuration of device profile upon device connectivity

￭ Remote Support portal to perform device sanity check

￭ Normalization of the OBIS data model - to enable data consolidation from multiple
metering vendors

￭ Web GUI in HTML5/CSS3 to enable interactions from a variety of devices

AXPERIENCE Smart Metering Data Sheet 2

 ￭ WSGI compliant application server to enable HA and multiple site distribution

￭ Choice of non-SQL back-end data store for very high scale data collection

￭ Support for multiple profiles in the DLMS/COSEM initial handshake

￭ Choice of export formats from a variety of options ( WSDL APIs, CSV, SQL APIs )
smart metering

Overview of Client for Client/Server Solution

￭ Fully written in ANSI-C

￭ Compatible with nearly every POSIX-compliant system

￭ Really Lightweight: 50 - 70 KB (platform dependent) binary

￭ Integration within just a few days

￭ Event driven engine: just a single process needed*

￭ No use of time- and memory consuming threads or multiple processes

￭ RunCommand implementation allows managing EVERY feature of your device

￭ Easily extendable by its simple but powerful API

￭ Add vendor specific events within minutes

￭ Add vendor specific RPC calls within minutes

￭ No need for specific data models

AXPERIENCE Smart Metering Data Sheet

 Product Feature Set
DMLS Communication
smart metering
￭ Currently the TCP/IP communication profile is supported. This profile supports data
exchange via the Internet over various physical media, like Ethernet, ISDN, GPRS,
PSTN or GSM using PPP etc. In this profile, the COSEM AL is supported by the
COSEM transport layer(s), comprising of a wrapper and the Internet TCP or UDP
protocol.

￭ If so required by the market, and for backward compatibility only, AXPERIENCE will also
support the HDLC-based profile and the S-FSK PLC based profile. It has to be noted
that the majority of the current implementations in smart metering are happening using
either the broadband connectivity or the cellular network, bith supported by the TCP/IP
profile.

￭ Unicast Application Association ( AA )

￭ Multicast and Broadcast messages are also supported, where the underlying network
supports them, with pre-established AAs.

￭ Protocol identification service ( optional ). To be used in the context of a mixed device /

server environment.

￭ Support for the ACSE for COSEM_over_IP on both daisy chain topology and star
topology

￭ Support for xDLMS set of services

Other DMLS Application Services

￭ Manual configuration of metering parameters during installation

￭ Automatic configuration of metering parameters based on signaling on the public client

address (0x10)

￭ Full support for mode C

￭ Support for mode E ( optional ). Requires also implementation of the HDLC profile.

￭ Connection pooling on connection oriented DLMS TLs. This feature ensures both a high
degree of scalability in the system and the possibility for a very fexible deployment
model for HA.

AXPERIENCE Smart Metering Data Sheet 4

 Non DLMS Application Services

For non DLMS metering deployments the lack of standardization on the data model
requires a combination of festures already available in the AXPERIENCE suite. For a more
detailed description of the features please refer to the Architecture Overview in the
following paragraphs.
smart metering

AXPERIENCE Smart Metering Data Sheet

 Architecture Description
A Brief Overview
smart metering
General

The AXPERIENCE Smart Metering solution is a special instance of the AXPERIENCDE

architecture.

As such, on top of the DLMS/COSEM capabilities which have been outlined in the
previous chapter, the user will find the Device Management and monitoring capabilities
available in other instances of the Axiros products.

The puropose of thsi paragraph is to provide an overview of these capabilities.

Home Network Protcol Gateways

The smart metering application context might involve - in some non DLMS compliant
implementation - the use of home gateways that could act as transparent communication
proxies or as reall communication endponts.

To this purpose the AXPERIENCE platform provides a mean to manage these end-points
both from the point of view of a communciation device as well as a host for metering
applications. This is somehow reflected also in the DLMS Green Book - when referencing
for instance the presence of a local bus in a multi-meter site installation. However since the
purpose of the specification is entirely on the metering function, the task to manage the

AXPERIENCE Smart Metering Data Sheet 6

 local network communication infrastructure is considered out of scope from that
specification.

It is however a signicant business issue for the operator and the purpose of this module is
to provide a mechanism to manage this communication bus.

Application Frameworks
smart metering

In order to support the client/server model - not required for DLMS compliant meters - a
choice of two different execution environments is provided. The server backend will ensure
that all Application Lifecycle Management functions will be supported - from new
application and modules deployment to monitoring of the running status and resource
usage for a running application - for at least two major frameworks in the market: OSGI
and Linux Debian Package.

On top of it it is ensured that - for broader compatibility - the implementation follows the
BBWF specification as defined in the TR-157 technical reccommendation.

High Performance Communication Controller

This modules relies on the Axiros AXTRACT implementation that is already deployed in
several operators to perform data collection from end user devices on a scale as large as
several milions of devices.

The reliability and performance of this component is key to ensure that - even at very high
data rates, such as several thousands of TCP connections per second on a single server -
the data collection infrastructure will always perform with the highest reliability.

Device Discovery
This application function relies on the lower elements of the application architecture and
behaves in a consistent way no matter what is the underlying communciation protocol in
use. It is an important feature in every multi-meter installation to ensure comprehensive
O&M of all equipments installed in the premise.

Provisioning
This module builds on the functionality available in AXESS and the configuration capability
- both manual and automatic - made available through the close integration of dynamic
northbound interface, service decomposition, internal workflkow and adaptable
southbound protocols. This is again an important feature in handling multi-vendor DLMS
metering deployments where the normalization of configuration parameters is generally a
difficult task. It becomes even more important when the device base is not just multi-
vendor but also multi-technology.

Inventory
This Inventory function comes as a byproduct of the AXPERIENCE system architecture,
which is in turn built on AXESS: No additional effort is required to ingest all the
configuration parameters from the device base - it is actually a function that builds on the
information exchange thta’s realized during AA ( Application Association ). In addition to

AXPERIENCE Smart Metering Data Sheet

 that the operator might choose to configure an arbitrary number of metatada parameters
which are ingested in the inventory and made available to the operator console,

Application Lifecycle Management

The module builds on top of the functionality offered by the Application Frameworks - both
OSGI and LDP - and it allows the operator to define the software and hardware
dependencies for any given application module, to provide a mechanism for automatic
smart metering

software distribution with resource aware - meaning software and hardware dependencies
- workflows and to monitor the execution status of the running modules.

This application function is not related to the DLMS context - but rather on the metering
deployments where the majority of the metering functions are realized on an additional
gateway which is not DLMS compliant.

Service Message Broker

This module is meant to provide the functionality of message routing and data
transformation required when the AXPERIENCE solution is use din conjunction with
additional MDMS.

The data handling scenarios are fully configurable to allow different applications to receive
different message flows and structures.

AXPERIENCE Smart Metering Data Sheet

 Deployment Notes
Hardware Requirements

The AXPERIENCE smart metering can be installed in any standard server configuration
smart metering

whereby the minimum hardware configuration will be:

￭ Dual Core / Dual CPU system

￭ 8 GB RAM

￭ Dual NIC

￭ Redundant HDD ( preferably SSD )

Software Requirements

￭ OS: Linux Debian 6.x

￭ DB: MySQL and MongoDB ( part of the AXPERIENCE licensing )

￭ On the client side for GUIs any standard web browser is supported ( with the only
exception of IE < 7.0 )

AXPERIENCE Smart Metering Data Sheet