Citation
Meghan Clark, Brad Campbell, Prabal Dutta. "Deltaflow: Submetering by Synthesizing Uncalibrated Pulse Sensor Streams". ACM e-Energy'14: The 5th International Conference on Future Energy Systems, ACM, 11, June, 2014.

Abstract
Current submetering systems suffer from prohibitive device costs, invasive installations, and burdensome maintenance. In this paper, we present Deltaflow, a submetering system that can estimate the power draw of individual loads by augmenting aggregate measurements with very simple sensors. The key insight is that we can drastically reduce sensor complexity by encoding information in the mere existence of a radio transmission, rather than the contents of that transmission. A sensor consisting simply of a radio and an energyharvesting power supply tuned to harvest a side-channel emission of energy consumption (e.g. light, heat, magnetic inductance, vibration) will exhibit an activation frequency that is correlated with the power draw of the load to which it is affixed. These sensors report their activation frequencies to the data-processing backend, which can determine the actual power draw by incorporating ground truth aggregate measurements such as those provided by utility meters. The server maps sensor activations to energy consumption by observing when the aggregate measurement and the sensor activation frequency change simultaneously. The server iteratively partitions the system history into discrete states which are used to construct and solve instances of a linear optimization problem. Solutions to the problem reveal the mapping from pulse frequencies to individual load power draw. This systems approach to submetering results in deployments that are easy to install and maintain, while contributing zero additional load, enabling building owners and occupants to simply affix tags to energy consumers and automatically begin receiving real-time power draw readings.

Electronic downloads

• https://www.src.org/library/publication/p069235/. (Link to paper on SRC website.)
• http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2602044.2602070

• HTML

  Meghan Clark, Brad Campbell, Prabal Dutta. <a
  href="http://www.terraswarm.org/pubs/247.html"
  >Deltaflow: Submetering by Synthesizing Uncalibrated
  Pulse Sensor Streams</a>, ACM e-Energy'14: The 5th
  International Conference on Future Energy Systems, ACM, 11,
  June, 2014.

• Plain text

  Meghan Clark, Brad Campbell, Prabal Dutta. "Deltaflow:
  Submetering by Synthesizing Uncalibrated Pulse Sensor
  Streams". ACM e-Energy'14: The 5th International
  Conference on Future Energy Systems, ACM, 11, June, 2014.

• BibTeX

  @inproceedings{ClarkCampbellDutta14_DeltaflowSubmeteringBySynthesizingUncalibratedPulse,
      author = {Meghan Clark and Brad Campbell and Prabal Dutta},
      title = {Deltaflow: Submetering by Synthesizing
                Uncalibrated Pulse Sensor Streams},
      booktitle = {ACM e-Energy'14: The 5th International Conference
                on Future Energy Systems},
      organization = {ACM},
      day = {11},
      month = {June},
      year = {2014},
      abstract = {Current submetering systems suffer from
                prohibitive device costs, invasive installations,
                and burdensome maintenance. In this paper, we
                present Deltaflow, a submetering system that can
                estimate the power draw of individual loads by
                augmenting aggregate measurements with very simple
                sensors. The key insight is that we can
                drastically reduce sensor complexity by encoding
                information in the mere existence of a radio
                transmission, rather than the contents of that
                transmission. A sensor consisting simply of a
                radio and an energyharvesting power supply tuned
                to harvest a side-channel emission of energy
                consumption (e.g. light, heat, magnetic
                inductance, vibration) will exhibit an activation
                frequency that is correlated with the power draw
                of the load to which it is affixed. These sensors
                report their activation frequencies to the
                data-processing backend, which can determine the
                actual power draw by incorporating ground truth
                aggregate measurements such as those provided by
                utility meters. The server maps sensor activations
                to energy consumption by observing when the
                aggregate measurement and the sensor activation
                frequency change simultaneously. The server
                iteratively partitions the system history into
                discrete states which are used to construct and
                solve instances of a linear optimization problem.
                Solutions to the problem reveal the mapping from
                pulse frequencies to individual load power draw.
                This systems approach to submetering results in
                deployments that are easy to install and maintain,
                while contributing zero additional load, enabling
                building owners and occupants to simply affix tags
                to energy consumers and automatically begin
                receiving real-time power draw readings.},
      URL = {http://terraswarm.org/pubs/247.html}
  }
  

Posted by Barb Hoversten on 26 Jan 2014.