User's Manual

Understanding Silver Spring Networks Access Points 1 About Access Points
Understanding Silver Spring Networks Access Points Rev 3 22 January 2013 Silver Spring Networks 14
Figure 4 illustrates data collected from a live customer network over a period of one week.
As shown, the average bandwidth consumed by Advanced Metering traffic is approximately
15 Kbps or 15%, leaving 85% for other smart grid solutions such as DA or DR (disaster
recovery).
It is worth noting that there are a number of factors that impact each RF Mesh link between
any two nodes including but not limited to: scheduled jobs (such as meter reads), path
selection from an RF device to an Access Point, failures or outages, etc. An effective method
to monitor network performance (data transmission, bandwidth utilization, etc.) is at an
Access Point as the AP is the take out point for all associated RF devices. Meaning RF devices
and Relays in the Silver Spring NAN are constantly retuning to, optimizing their paths and
reporting into their Access Points.
All traffic flowing in and out of the RF Mesh network must traverse the Access Point. While it
is fairly simple to monitor a single Access Point, it is important to realize that there are
typically many Access Points in a commercially deployed smart grid system. The Silver
Spring solution enables all Access Points to operate independently and in parallel, effectively
increasing throughput and reducing latency.
The Silver Spring UtilityIQ NEM, GridScape, and HCM enable the configuration of polices
for bandwidth utilization for both the WAN and the NAN. Once configured, the monitoring
applications generate alerts for any bandwidth utilization policy violations. The network
statistics report provides detailed insight into potential network load issues.
The monitoring applications can measure and report on RF characteristics in the NAN,
including the identification of devices associated with areas of poor coverage. Having such
data enables Silver Spring to assess whether such areas require the deployment of additional
Relays or Access Points. This is especially useful in the early phases of a deployment.
Figure 4. Average bandwidth consumed by AMI traffic