Advanced metering infrastructure backhaul reliability improvement with cognitive radio

The monitoring of the smart distribution grid requires a reliable telecommunication system. In this paper, we propose to use cognitive radio to enhance the reliability of smart grid communications. We show that, in case of failure of the primary wireless communication network used for the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) backhaul, cognitive radio can be used to connect aggregators to a backup network. The chosen backup network can be a cellular network or an IoT (internet of things) network. Then, an analysis of the reliability of the AMI backhaul in an IoT network is done and we show how cognitive radio and machine learning algorithms can be used to enhance the communications reliability.