Periodic data reporting strategies for IEEE 802.11s-based Smart Grid AMI networks

IEEE 802.11s-based wireless mesh networks are one of the options to implement Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs) in Smart Grid (SG). Typically, TCP is used along with 802.11s to provide reliability when collecting fine-grained smart meter (SM) data. Due to the need for real-time monitoring of the grid, SM data needs to be collected at the same time which creates a lot of traffic and interference among the SMs. In this paper, we propose novel mechanisms to set the periodic reporting time of each SM to improve the performance of TCP in IEEE 802.11s-based NANs in terms of packet delay. The first idea is based on using the location of the SMs in the network topology and assigns a periodic reporting time based on its distance from the gateway. The second idea imitates the time division multiple access methods and assigns a separate slot for each SM. We extensively evaluated the proposed strategies of setting the schedule of SMs through simulation in ns-3 network simulator which has a built-in 802.11 implementation. Compared to the existing mechanism, the results indicate that the delay performance can be improved significantly without any negative impact on the other performance metrics.