A Power Sharing Scheme in a Prepaid Power System

Abstract

This report proposes the design and implementation of a power sharing scheme that will enable a customer to share power units with another customer. The implementation of a power sharing service will include development of a Unstructured Supplementary Services Data application to access and provide service through token generation. Unstructured Supplementary Services Data applications usually run on Global System for Mobile Communication network platforms. UMEME’s Prepaid Metering System only allows its customers to purchase, load and consume Yaka units and mostly offline meters are installed at consumers premises. Currently, it is introducing online meters that have real-time communication with the server and thus implementation of this service will be made easier. The Unstructured Supplementary Services Data application will query the server for service and the server responds with a 20-digit token number. Server in this case is a MySQL server that calls a special function to implement the required service. The server is also a host to a database that stores customer account information that it updates in real time. It is this information that is manipulated to generate token number. Communication between Unstructured Supplementary Services Data application and server is managed by a scripting program which is ideally part of the Unstructured Supplementary Services Data application application. The Unstructured Supplementary Services Data application and the scripting program were developed in Visual Studio using PHP. The database was developed using MySQL phpMyAdmin and both MySQL and PHP server are implemented using XAMPP, the Relational Database Management system used in our proposed system model is MySQL, it encrypts customer account information into 20-digit token number before responding to request from the Unstructured Supplementary Services Data application. Testing and evaluation of the system capabilities was done by running the Unstructured Supplementary Services Data application code in a sandbox such as Postman and African’s Talking that act as USSD gateways.