User Instructions

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1 Open Issues
• What type of location information will we use (e.g., lat, long,
elevation, pole #) for gateways, relays and meters?
• What tool will we adopt for network RF planning, and how will
we interface the rest of the system to it?
2 Introduction
The Enterprise Network and Internet Communications (ENICS)
system is a set of software applications that allow either utilities or
Innovatec acting as a service bureau to manage and operate an Innovatec
communications network. The functions required include the ability to
read meters, monitor network operation, install, decommission, swap
and test all elements in the communications network and handle alarms.
In addition, Innovatec must have a means of planning and laying out
communications networks, training users and demonstrating the system
to prospective customers. For development it is desirable to have some
means of exercising the communications network in a more intensive
manner than we have been able to in the past.
It will be necessary to update and possibly gather data from
databases that are not part of the Innovatec system. For example, a
utility may have a billing database (and applications that use it) already
in place. Data from scheduled reads might be placed into this billing
database.
Finally, it should be possible to log events of interest for later
analysis either by utility personnel or applications in the Innovatec
system.
Innovatec plans to eventually use the system for very large
installations (on the order of 10 million meters or more). Thus, it is
necessary to architect and build the system in such a way that its
functions can be distributed across multiple machines and possibly
multiple servers.
In addition, in Innovatec’s role as a service bureau, it may be
necessary to site a gateway server and possibly some server functions at
a customer site, while the rest are handled at Innovatec’s offices. For
example, a utility may want to put modems at their site so that calls to
gateways are local calls, while Innovatec administers the network
remotely.
A high level schematic for the Innovatec utility system is shown in
Figure 1. In the schematic, each of the applications is shown as if it was
a traditional monolithic program. However, the Innovatec system is
being designed and implemented as a multitier architecture in which the
user interface is a set of Java applets and HTML pages which use a set of
servants to access various services, such as database access.