Comparison of deployment distribution models for communication traffic evaluation of multi-hop wireless smart meters

In this research work, three types of deployment models of multi-hop wireless smart meter networks have been compared. Three types of models, namely, regular grid, uniform random, and actual town models were constructed. Multi-hop data transmission simulations were carried out to obtain packet delivery rates and data transmission times from each smart meter to an access point. The variation ranges of packet delivery rates for the random and actual models were approximately 3 times larger than that for the regular models. The data transmission times for the actual and random models were relatively worse than those for the regular models. We introduced two spatial analysis indexes and found that these indexes of the actual models are similar to those of the random models rather than the regular models. These indexes are possibly used to estimate the communication performance of the smart meter network in an actual deployment.