A transport control protocol suite for smart metering infrastructure

Transport protocol design for supporting smart metering applications poses certain challenges because of unique issues. The issues stem from the need to deploy a significantly large number of meters (e.g., hundreds of thousands). Each meter generates small reports at a fixed low rate. All meters' reports are destined to the same data collection center and require reliable end-to-end delivery. Although individual data rates are low, aggregation creates large traffic that can disrupt the network functionality. Our experiments show that for this type of application, the Internet transport control protocol (TCP) results in the following drawbacks: (i) Meters' data suffer from excessive packet retransmission rate. (ii) Other applications suffer from high packet drop rate at shared bottleneck links. In this paper, we propose a solution through the addition of a TCP aggregator device and the use of an application level protocol called Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). At the TCP aggregator device, meters' TCP connections get combined into one TCP connection with the utility collection server. The SIP protocol acts as the signaling protocol to provide the different network parties with proper transport control information. The proposed strategy provides better response to traffic conditions and, most importantly, makes congestion control and flow control viable. Using the simulator NS-2, we show the effectiveness of our approach in mitigating the problems in terms of throughput and packet drop rate performance measures.