Abstract
In order to improve the management mechanisms of the electric energy transport infrastructures, the smart grid networks have associated data networks that are responsible for transporting the necessary information between the different elements of the electricity network and the control center. Besides, they make possible a more efficient use of this type of energy. Part of these data networks is comprised of the Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs), which are responsible for interconnecting the different smart meters and other possible devices present at the consumers’ premises with the control center. Among the proposed network technologies for NANs, wireless technologies are becoming more relevant due to their flexibility and increasing available bandwidth. In this paper, some general modifications are proposed for the routing protocol of the wireless multi-hop mesh networks standardized by the IEEE. In particular, the possibility of using multiple paths and transmission channels at the same time, depending on the quality of service needs of the different network traffic, is added. The proposed modifications have been implemented in the ns-3 simulator and evaluated in situations of high traffic load. Simulation results show improvements in the network performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, throughput and network transit time.
Highlights
Electric energy is currently an essential resource all around the world
The number of nodes in the grid is a variable parameter, the data concentrator is located in the bottom left corner, and all applications are running simultaneously in every Home Area Network (HAN)
Except for the number of control and data channels and their frequencies, well-known values were chosen for the rest of the parameters in Table 7, which were used in most smart grid Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs) simulations
Summary
Electric energy is currently an essential resource all around the world. With the increase in the use of new technologies in all sectors of human activity, it is easy to predict that the consumption of this type of energy will grow considerably in the near future. The modification of the routing metrics is a good idea to differentiate the service offered to different traffic in the network, we preferred to maintain the basic airtime link metric and focused our efforts on the modification of the mechanism used by the HWMP protocol for the selection of the most appropriate path each time a data packet must be (re)transmitted. It is important to keep in mind that working with more complicated metrics usually leads to higher CPU and memory requirements in the network nodes, as well as to protocols that generate more network control traffic In this way, a modification of the HMWP protocol is proposed and implemented, to allow an efficient selection of paths among multiple possibilities, depending on the service quality needs of the different traffic flows.
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