Abstract:
Designing efficient and reliable wireless mesh-based
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) networks is challenging.
In AMI networks, fine-grained regular data collections
from smart meters create a lot of traffic and interference. The
location of the gateway that collects data from smart meters
may also add to this interference by impacting the length of
routes. Furthermore, TCP-like protocols that are employed for
reliability may bring additional overhead. Therefore, it is critical
to pick the suitable data collection strategy and gateway location
to meet some Smart Grid performance requirements. In this
paper, we proposed three novel data collection mechanisms to
set the periodic reporting time of each smart meter to improve
TCP performance in IEEE 802.11s-based wireless mesh AMI
networks. The first idea was based on the nature of IEEE 802.11s
routing protocol. Each smart meter is assigned a reporting time
based on its location in the spanning tree network. The second
idea was inspired by the time division multiple access (TDMA)
methods where each meter is given a separate slot. The third
idea was based on both previous ideas and clustering to increase
the number of meters that can send at the same slot. For the
gateway location, we also proposed a novel mechanism based
on p-center facility problem to minimize data delivery delay.
The simulation results indicate that the packet delay can be
improved significantly without any negative impact on the other
performance metrics.
