Industry’s Most Advanced Network Architecture

The SecureMesh Neighborhood Area Network (NAN) is the industry’s most advanced and interoperable utility network architecture solution and provides scalable, secure access and device management for mesh-connected AMI devices such as water, electric and gas meters with instantaneous enterprise-to-gateway connectivity to residential and commercial locations. Information is available on-schedule, on-demand, or on-event from virtually anywhere via these wireless communication devices. The SecureMesh NAN is a true peer-to-peer multi-hop communications architecture that consists of:

• SecureMesh Collector - a communications gateway that coordinates communication within the SecureMesh NAN. It operates as the intermediary data concentrators, collecting and filtering data from groups of SecureMesh-enabled meters, and economically sharing wide area network resources making communication more affordable while ensuring high performance.
• SecureMesh Repeaters – an intermediate wireless node in the SecureMesh NAN to relay messages to and from SecureMesh-enabled electric meters, gas meters, and in-building devices.
• SecureMesh Meter Modules – automatically establish alternative SecureMesh Collector relationships based on application performance settings to ensure timely and secure delivery of data. SecureMesh Collector devices act as self-organizing conduits to multiple wide area network resources.
• UnitySuite™ Head-End Software – a smart meter data management system that performs data acquisition (or control) over high bandwidth and with greater reliability than proprietary network solutions. Organized data is delivered to the enterprise systems via device management and enterprise data web services.

The SecureMesh NAN is a wireless mesh network composed of multiple NAN subnetworks, each defined by a NAN Collector. For each Collector, a mesh network of associated NAN devices is created, where NAN nodes employ omnidirectional antennas and autonomously form a mesh network as each node exchanges messages with its nearest neighbors. The links between NAN nodes are then defined by the electric and gas meter and home locations, with Repeaters and, as necessary, additional NAN Collectors introduced based on the coverage requirements imposed by those locations.

Backhaul from a Collector can be supported by TCP/IP through an Ethernet connection to a WAN device or through an integrated GSM or CDMA cellular data modems.

NAN Use of Standards

SecureMesh NAN radios use IEEE 802.15.4 standard, allowing off-the-shelf 802.15.4 transceiver integrated circuits to be employed in Trilliant’s radio designs. Per the 802.15.4 PHY, an air data rate of 250 kbps is supported for all links.

At the Application layer, a variety of protocols can be carried over the NAN, but the standard ANSI C12.22 application layer protocol is employed natively, providing end-to-end security mechanisms as well as direct support of communications with ANSI C12.19 meters.

NAN Mesh Networking

Routing through the NAN mesh network is performed on a per-packet basis. A NAN data message may comprise one or more packets, but each packet is individually routed. The SecureMesh NAN routing algorithms dynamically determine the best path for each packet to take as it traverses the network, where each node acts autonomously based on the routing information contained in the data packet header, its own knowledge of the network, and the current state of each individual link.

Mesh operation in the NAN tier thus provides route diversity as a fundamental aspect of its operation. In the event that a NAN node fails, routing tables of the other NAN nodes will be autonomously updated and packets will be routed around the failure. In the event that a Collector fails, each NAN node will autonomously determine the best path to other nearby Collectors and associate with its subnetwork. In the event that the WAN tier is not able to provide backhaul for a Collector, the Collector will autonomously store data from its NAN subnetwork until connectivity is restored.

NAN Security

All SecureMesh NAN devices (including all Collector and Bridge devices) employ end-to-end security and communicating parties are mutually authenticated by a symmetric key model.

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