DISTRIBUTING OVERALL CONTROL OF MESH AMR LAN NETWORKS TO WAN INTERCONNECTED COLLECTORS.

摘要

Collectors within a wireless metering network that control a wireless Local Area Network (LAN) of nodes. The collectors typically interact over a WAN with a head-end system, which has network management and control of all collector LANs. Control is distributed from the head-end system down to the data collectors by using TCP/IP data networks to interconnect the data collectors. The data collectors are interconnected on high bandwidth TCP/IP networks and can establish peer-to-peer communications and participate in the overall network control. The data collectors coordinate information about the mesh LAN-connected nodes with one another in a peer-to-peer manner to distribute overall network control to establish peer-to-peer registration of data collectors during self installations, and optimize overall self-healing and adaptive reconfiguration capabilities of the network when nodes migrate such that data collection processes can proceed without interruption.