Abstract
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) will play an important role in order to realize the vision of a smart grid. An integral part of AMI is a set of smart meters, which measure and transmit power consumption data periodically with fixed intervals. If the bandwidth allocated to AMI is much more than the capacity necessary for collecting power consumption data, the remaining part of the bandwidth can be used for other types of communication. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model and evaluate the communication performance of AMI taking into account the variable number of smart meters, caused by the turn on/off of meters and mobility of meters across the AMI network coverage. We construct a discrete time Markov chain whose states are defined by the numbers of on-state meters and request-holding meters, deriving some performance measures.