Traffic scheduling for wireless meter data collection in smart grid communication network

Abstract

Due to the advantages of muti-hop communication, self-organizing, self-healing and reliability, wireless muti-hop mesh network becomes an ideal solution for smart grid meter data collection. However, wireless muti-hop meter data collection network faces limitation and challenge on communication performance of network caused by application layer data traffic and the network topology limitation. When a large number of data occur in emergence, some mesh nodes (smart meters) which are in pivotal location will face great communication pressure and probably lead to extremely data congestion. This paper utilizes a three-layer network to form the wireless muti-hop meter data collection communication network, next proposes a new random switching traffic scheduling algorithm based on meter data collection tree with the idea of load balancing, and then gives an optimization for random switching traffic scheduling. Simulation show that the new traffic scheduling mechanism can create a balanced meter data collection tree, significantly reduce the packet loss ratio of the burst data and release congestion of system.