On the Capacity of Smart Grid Wireless Backhaul With Delay Guarantee and Packet Concatenation

Abstract

In future smart grids, low channel efficiency due to small data payloads and the delay guarantee of many near-real-time applications would become two important issues. In this paper, we propose to employ a deadline-ordered scheduler with packet concatenation and apply admission control (AC) to resolve these two issues. In order to execute the AC mechanism, the delay bounds in the home area network and the neighborhood area network and the affine arrival curves for modeling the flows injecting into the concentrator are derived using network calculus. The performance of this novel design is illustrated via analytical and simulation results. In addition, the robust header compression protocol is adopted as a benchmark to evaluate the performance with the packet concatenation method. It is shown that the proposed scheduler with packet concatenation significantly improves the capacity of the smart grid wireless backhaul, and our AC mechanism provides a reliable estimate of the capacity.