Uplink scheduling for smart metering and real-time traffic coexistence in LTE networks

Smart Grid (SG) is considered as the future of the electrical power distribution system, where Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) will let utilities to acquire and analyze the consumption data and access and control several home appliances for power balancing purposes through special devices, known as Smart Meters (SMs). Long Term Evolution (LTE) appears as a promising solution to handle the SMs traffic due to its high bandwidth and flexibility. However, given that SMs need to periodically send measurements to the eNodeB (eNB), the network uplink could be a potential bottleneck, thus affecting the users running real-time applications, such as voice calls. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we present a scheduling policy that jointly considers the channel quality, the traffic prioritization and the AMI Packet Delay Budget (PDB) in order to provide the SMs with the required resources and reduce the impact on the real-time traffic. Extensive simulation experiments have been carried out, indicating the smooth coexistence between the SMs and the voice users, since the proposed scheduler achieves higher percentage of served users compared to widely employed schedulers.