Distributed Ledger Smart Sensor Billing
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current utility network infrastructure systems face challenges in configuring smart sensors for specific billing rates and meter configuration updates, predicting resource consumption, and ensuring secure payment systems, leading to inefficiencies and financial strains on utility suppliers.
Innovation Solution
A distributed ledger system is implemented in a tiered utility architecture, enabling smart contracts for near-real-time payments, dynamic rate applications, demand response events, and location awareness, while ensuring enhanced security through encryption schemes that obscure digital addresses.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If distributed ledger technology is implemented for real-time payments and dynamic rate applications, then billing efficiency and resource management accuracy are improved, but device complexity and implementation difficulty increase
Solution Approach 1:
The utility network is divided into multiple independent nodes (smart meters, sensors, utility servers) that each maintain a copy of the distributed ledger. This segmentation allows parallel processing of billing transactions and rate applications across the network, improving billing efficiency while distributing system complexity across multiple manageable components rather than concentrating it in a single centralized system.
Solution Approach 2:
The distributed ledger acts as an intermediary layer between utility suppliers and consumers, enabling automated smart contract execution for real-time payments and dynamic rate applications. This intermediary mechanism handles the complexity of transaction verification, consensus reaching, and data synchronization, allowing the system to achieve high billing efficiency without requiring complex point-to-point communication protocols between all network participants.
2Reliability
If decentralized network architecture is adopted to reduce latency and improve robustness, then communication speed and system reliability are improved, but security management and node accuracy become more difficult to control
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines multiple security mechanisms into the distributed ledger architecture: cryptographic hashing, digital signatures, consensus algorithms, and immutable chaining of blocks. This merging of security functions into a unified distributed system provides robust network reliability through decentralized verification while managing security complexity through standardized cryptographic protocols that are automatically executed across all nodes without requiring manual security management at each node.
3Speed
If smart sensors operate autonomously with local decision-making capabilities, then response time and operational efficiency are improved, but computing power requirements and energy consumption increase
Solution Approach 1:
Smart sensors perform only the minimal computational actions required for their specific function (measuring, detecting, or simple local processing) rather than full autonomous decision-making. The distributed ledger handles the heavier computational tasks such as transaction verification, consensus reaching, and complex data analysis. This partial action approach allows sensors to achieve fast response times for their core functions while avoiding the excessive energy consumption that would result from giving them full autonomous computing capabilities.
Data Source
AI summary
A distributed ledger based utility system architecture may be configured to enable secure payments, data transmission, and meter configuration of smart sensors. The utility system architecture may be a tiered architecture including multiple nodes at different levels of the architecture where each level may contain a different portion of the distributed ledger. As information is added to the distributed ledger, each portion of the distributed ledger may be updated based on whether the information is relevant to that node. The information may include rate contract transactions, meter configuration data transactions, payment transactions, or the like.