IoT smart metering solution
In today's world of growing urban infrastructure, energy efficiency and water management have become top priorities. Smart metering solutions powered by the ThingsBoard IoT platform offer a transformative approach to utility monitoring, enabling stakeholders to access accurate, real-time insights into consumption patterns.
With enhanced visibility, municipalities, facilities managers, and utility providers can make faster, data-driven decisions that optimize resource use, reduce waste, and lower operational costs. ThingsBoard plays an important role in this evolution by offering flexible, open-source tools to collect, process, and visualize telemetry data across distributed assets such as meters, sensors, and edge devices. Its modular architecture and rich feature set enable seamless integration of diverse devices, ensuring reliable real-time monitoring and control of utility infrastructure.
This use case showcases how ThingsBoard empowers organizations to build robust, end-to-end smart metering solutions. By combining protocol versatility, intuitive dashboards, and powerful rule engines, ThingsBoard makes it easy to monitor energy and water usage across residential, commercial, and municipal environments—enhancing sustainability and operational control.
Solution structure of smart metering
The ThingsBoard solution is designed to seamlessly integrate with smart meters and environmental sensors using a broad set of IoT protocols including MQTT, CoAP, and HTTP. These protocols enable low-latency, efficient data transmission even over constrained networks.
Smart meters transmit electricity, water, and temperature data to ThingsBoard via lightweight, efficient protocols. The platform processes this data through its rule engine, enabling alarms, storage, or forwarding.
Telemetry is securely stored and visualized on customizable dashboards. Built-in widgets help display trends, real-time usage, and alarms — forming a scalable, reliable system from device to dashboard.
Smart metering dashboard structure
The ThingsBoard smart metering dashboard is structured hierarchically for clear navigation across different locations and asset levels. Each level is designed to provide intuitive, real-time visualization of data, ensuring stakeholders can act quickly and effectively.
Applications of IoT smart metering solution
A similar IoT-based monitoring and management solution, like IoT smart metering, can be adapted and applied in various industries and domains. Here are some of them:
Municipal utilities
Optimize city-wide water and energy management to support sustainable urban development.
Commercial facilities
Ensure operational efficiency and compliance with green building standards by tracking real-time resource use.
Educational institutions
Empower facility managers to improve campus energy efficiency and promote eco-friendly behavior.
Residential complexes
Enable landlords and tenants to monitor and reduce energy bills through transparent usage tracking.
Industrial plants
Gain insights into high-consumption areas, detect leaks or overuse early, and prevent costly downtime.
Municipal utilities
Optimize city-wide water and energy management to support sustainable urban development.
Residential complexes
Enable landlords and tenants to monitor and reduce energy bills through transparent usage tracking.
Commercial facilities
Ensure operational efficiency and compliance with green building standards by tracking real-time resource use.
Industrial plants
Gain insights into high-consumption areas, detect leaks or overuse early, and prevent costly downtime.
Educational institutions
Empower facility managers to improve campus energy efficiency and promote eco-friendly behavior.
Summary of smart metering
IoT smart metering with ThingsBoard provides a scalable, flexible way to monitor utilities. Through sensor integration and protocol support, data is collected and visualized across districts, buildings, and apartments. ThingsBoard enables tracking of energy use, alarms, and temperature trends—helping users make timely decisions and meet sustainability goals across industries. With ThingsBoard, organizations can build future-ready smart metering systems that scale, adapt, and drive sustainable impact.
ThingsBoard advantages
Security
ThingsBoard protects your data with industry-standard encryption algorithms like RSA and ECDSA. Secure communication is ensured via TLS (TCP) and DTLS (UDP). Role-based access control and audit logs further enhance platform security.
Data visualization
Visualize data with interactive, multi-state dashboards—no coding needed. Use built-in charts, gauges, maps, tables, and control widgets. Customize every detail via advanced settings or custom widget bundles. Real-time, low-latency updates supported via embedded web-sockets.
Connectivity
Connect devices directly to the platform via the following built-in protocols: HTTP, CoAP, MQTT, LwM2M, and SNMP. Connect devices in your local network to the cloud using ThingsBoard Gateway via Modbus, BLE, BACnet, OPC-UA, and other protocols.
Data processing
ThingsBoard allows you to define app logic using a drag-and-drop rule chain designer. Its scalable Rule Engine uses message queues like Kafka or AWS SQS for durable, reliable data processing. You can handle data within the engine or forward it to external systems.
Scalability and high availability
ThingsBoard supports high-availability cloud and on-prem deployments via Kubernetes or bare-metal. Its components scale horizontally and handle 18K+ vehicles and 5K+ devices in prod.
Multi-tenancy
ThingsBoard provides UI and API to manage tenants, customers, users, devices, and assets. Single tenant may have multiple tenant administrators and millions of devices and customers. It also offers out-of-the-box support of OTA updates for your smart meters.
