In the neighborhood area network (NAN), the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) enables a bidirectional connection between the smart meter (SM) and the data concentrator (DC). Sensors, such as smart meter nodes or environmental sensor nodes, play a crucial role in measuring and transmitting data to central units for advanced monitoring, management, and analysis of energy consumption. Wired and wireless communication technologies are used to implement the AMI-NAN. This paper delves into a novel approach for optimizing the choice of communication medium, air for radio frequency (RF) or power lines for power line communication (PLC), between the SM and DC in the context of the AMI-NAN. The authors methodically select the specific technologies, RF and NB-PLC (narrowband power line communication), and meticulously characterize their attributes. Then, a comparative analysis spanning rural, urban, and industrial settings is conducted to evaluate the proposed method. The overall reliability performance of the AMI-NAN system requires a packet error rate (PER) lower than 10%. To this end, an efficient approach is introduced to assess and enhance the reliability of NB-PLC and RF for AMI-NAN applications. Simulation results demonstrate that wireless communication is the optimal choice for the rural scenario, especially for a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) lower than 25 dB. However, in urban environments characterized by higher SNR values and moderately dense networks, NB-PLC gains prominence. In denser networks, it outperforms wireless communication, exhibiting a remarkable 10 dB gain for a bit error rate (BER) of 10⁻³. Moreover, in industrial zones characterized by intricate network topologies and non-linear loads, the power line channel emerges as the optimal choice for data transmission.

A new multistandard radio receiver architecture is presented to take advantage of nonuniformly controlled analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). By defining the statistical parameter related to the random sampling frequency, a time-quantized random sampling scheme is considered to design a nonuniform sampling-based software defined radio (SDR) multistandard receiver. A relaxed design is proposed for an E-GSM/UMTS/IEEE802.11a multistandard receiver. The designed baseband stage avoids the use of the automatic gain control block, relaxes the nonprogrammable antialiasing filter to the third order, and converts data with a 16-bit ADC at a 124-MHz mean sampling frequency.