Provisioning required reliability of wireless data communication in smart grid neighborhood area networks

Abstract

A possible candidate for implementing smart grid neighborhood area network (NAN) is wireless communications because of its advantages, such as flexibility and low installation and maintenance cost. However, one of the problems with wireless communication is its unreliability, whereas communication reliability is a basic requirement of smart grid applications. In this paper, we consider a wireless mesh network for NAN and then propose a method on the basis of hop-by-hop ARQ that achieves the required data communication reliability in wireless NAN and, at the same time, satisfies the communication latency constraint which is another requirement of smart grid applications. The proposed approach provides the optimal number of allowed retransmissions at each hop considering the loss probabilities of all hops and end-to-end delay constraint. Comparing to the typical application of ARQ in which the number of retransmissions permitted is the same at each hop, it is demonstrated that the proposed approach achieves a higher level of reliability while meeting the delay constraint. Moreover, the proposed method is evaluated by simulation, and the results are consistent with the results of the theoretical model.