Handling mission-critical communication in smart grid distribution automation services through LTE

In this paper, a novel random access mechanism is introduced to enable the integration of smart grid distribution automation (DA) services in public LTE networks. The smart grid paradigm is anticipated to improve grid reliability through extensive and timely information exchange in the power distribution network. LTE appears as a promising communication technology for advanced distribution grid services since it supports extensive coverage, low latency, and quality-of-service differentiation. However, the standardized random access channel (RACH) mechanism of LTE has difficulties to meet the stringent requirements of such services in terms of access latency and reliability. This is the motivation for the contribution in this paper, where a representative DA scenario is considered and the achievable performance is evaluated on a system-level simulator. Extensive simulations of realistic overload scenarios demonstrate that our properly designed RACH mechanism can greatly improve the access performance of DA traffic with negligible impact on background traffic, i.e., human-type communication and smart metering data exchange.