Abstract:
IEEE 802.11s-based wireless mesh networks are
one of the options to implement Neighborhood Area Networks
(NANs) in Smart Grid (SG). Typically, TCP is used along with
802.11s to provide reliability when collecting fine-grained smart
meter (SM) data. Due to the need for real-time monitoring of
the grid, SM data needs to be collected at the same time which
creates a lot of traffic and interference among the SMs. In
this paper, we propose novel mechanisms to set the periodic
reporting time of each SM to improve the performance of TCP
in IEEE 802.11s-based NANs in terms of packet delay. The first
idea is based on using the location of the SMs in the network
topology and assigns a periodic reporting time based on its
distance from the gateway. The second idea imitates the time
division multiple access methods and assigns a separate slot for
each SM. We extensively evaluated the proposed strategies of
setting the schedule of SMs through simulation in ns-3 network
simulator which has a built-in 802.11 implementation. Compared
to the existing mechanism, the results indicate that the delay
performance can be improved significantly without any negative
impact on the other performance metrics.
