I'm running a research project where we want to collect some readings from a smart meter that produces a public-key signature. We don't need to actually use the meter in any real deployment - it's purely a proof-of-concept experiment for a research project in cryptography. All we need to do is hook it up in a lab, and grab some readings from it on a computer.
I am new to to smart meters, I was recently checking out a smart meter system, the gateway is a esp8266 which communicates to the data collector over mqtt with some hex format. other meters connects to the gateway meter with some sort of rf mesh NAN with 32 bit meter address similar to ipv4. the data collector publish to the topic with the name of the grid id of the gateway meter.