Reliability Enhancement of Smart Metering System Using Millimeter Wave Technology

Abstract

Millimeter wave (mmWave) technology has been advocated as a promising infrastructure to provide reliable communications, both in indoor and outdoor environments. In this paper, we extend the application of mmWave to the uplink communication between smart meters (SMs) and a gateway. Such a communication is subject to interference from SMs belonging to adjacent networks and blockage caused by human bodies. Using a 3-D stochastic blockage model, we derive the outage probability. When human-body blockage is neglected, the high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) analysis shows a diversity gain of $(m_{L}M)$ , where $m_{L}$ is the Nakagami-fading parameter of the line of sight (LOS) of the reference transmitter’s channel, and $M$ is the number of receive antennas at the gateway. Accounting for human-body blockage, the diversity gain reduces to $(m_{N}M)$ , where $m_{N}$ is the Nakagami-fading parameter of the non LOS of the reference transmitter’s channel. Our analysis shows that the probability that an SM is in LOS decays exponentially with the link length and the density of blockages. Although at high SNR blockage reduces the diversity gain, our numerical results show that blockage may decrease the outage probability at finite SNR.