Prepaid Energy Meter Using Smart Card

The purpose of this project is to design and develop an intelligent energy metering system that can efficiently control the amount of electricity consumed by the user. Electricity users can buy specific amount of energy to use it only when they needed.

               Over the past few years, smart cards have achieved a growing acceptance as a powerful tool for security, identification, and authorization. Financial card issuers are moving to replace magnetic stripe cards with chip cards to reduce counterfeiting and fraud. The increasing computational power placed on the chip along with advances in cryptography has made the smart card a very powerful tool for identification.

        The advent of multi-application smart card operating systems for both contacts and contact less applications has put smart cards on the edge of information technology. Smart card based prepaid electricity is a unique and new concept which saves lot of time and power for electricity department. By swiping the card in front of reader then some number of units of electricity will be added. People now can buy electricity in advance, using the so-called prepaid electricity cards in the form of smart cards.

Keywords: Energy metering system, cryptography, smart cards.