Delay Critical Smart Grid Applications and Adaptive QoS Provisioning

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are anticipated to be widely adopted in the various monitoring and control applications due to their versatility and low cost. One of the most promising and emerging WSNs applications is their use in monitoring smart grid assets. Although WSNs can provide cost efficient and reliable solutions, they are not suitable for delay critical application, because they were initially designed for low data rate applications and they may be challenged when sudden faults or failures occur in the monitored environments. Therefore, to prevent extensive delays of critical data, appropriate quality of service (QoS) techniques should be used. In this paper, we present an adaptive QoS scheme (AQoS) and an adaptive guaranteed time slot (AGTS) allocation scheme for IEEE 802.15.4-based WSNs used in high traffic intensity smart grid monitoring applications. Both AQoS and AGTS schemes can adaptively reduce the end-to-end delay and flexibly tune the GTS to provide the required QoS differentiation to delay critical smart grid monitoring applications.