Cognitive beamforming based smart metering for coexistence with wireless local area networks

The ZigBee network has been considered to monitor electricity usage of home appliances in the smart grid network. Zig-Bee, however, may suffer from a coexistence problem with wireless local area network (WLAN). In this paper, to resolve the coexistence problem between ZigBee network and WLAN, we propose a new protocol constructing a cognitive smart grid network for supporting monitoring of home appliances. In the proposed protocol, home appliances first estimates the transmission timing and channel information of WLAN by reading request to send/clear to send (RTS/CTS) frames of WLAN. Next, based on the estimated information, home appliances transmit a data at the same time as WLAN transmission. To manage the interference between WLAN and smart grid network, we propose a cognitive beamforming algorithm. The beamforming algorithm is designed to guaranteeing zero interference to WLAN while satisfying a required rate for smart metering. We also propose an energy efficient rate adaptation algorithm. By slowing down the transmission rate while satisfying an imperceptible impact of quality of service (QoS) of the receiver, the home appliance can significantly save transmit power. Numerical results show that the proposed multiple antenna technique provides reliable communications for smart metering with reduced power comparing to the simple transmission technique.