A hybrid Random Access method for smart meters on LTE networks

One of the critical components of the Smart Grid (SG) is the Smart Meter (SM), which reports power consumption to a centralized control center at regular intervals. The Long Term Evolution (LTE) network has received much attention as a promising platform for SG communications due to its high bandwidth and low latency over a large coverage area. Nevertheless, when a huge number of SMs access the LTE network, the preamble collision becomes an issue. The negative effects of preamble collision are packet loss, delay, reestablishment attempts, and physical channel utilization, which degrade the performance of the LTE network. Hence, a Random Access (RA) mechanism is required for preamble signature to occupy Resource Blocks (RBs) for SMs. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid procedure that combines contention and non-contention based random access methods. The significance of this method is that, although SMs have fixed periodic communications, preamble signatures do not need to be reserved. The simulation results are compared with LTE standard. Packet loss is reduced by approximately 43%. SM latency is decreased by 11 ms at 90% of probability delay. Re-establishment attempts are lower than standard by proximately 76%. Finally, physical channel utilizations are reduced by around 3%.