Towards context-aware real-world environments: the case of a remote autonomous energy aware monitoring system

Work is underway on issues associated with the development of tools and services to reduce energy consumption. Current trends suggest that energy consumption is increasing and carbon reserves are decreasing whilst green technologies for energy generation are yet to prove themselves. In industry, there are many legacy installations of equipment capable of transmitting their energy usage via the MODBUS protocol. Here we introduce a means of logging energy usage data and transmitting it to a database. The motivation is that making energy users aware of their consumption can help assist them in taking informed action towards the reduction of wasted energy. Thus, we offer a state-of-the-art of possible networking technologies, which have led to a real-world implementation. We present requirements whilst we mathematically model the compression technique. On the development side, we use GSM/GPRS technology, embedded KJava runtime and a bespoke Java application as the framework to email the usage data to the database.