A scalable protocol stack for IEEE 802.11s-based advanced metering infrastructure networks

The utility companies and the researchers have been developing new applications and communication protocols for the Smart Grid Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) network. Since the AMI network consists of thousands of smart meters, it is built as a wireless mesh network (WMN) because it requires far less cabling work, thereby lowering the infrastructure, deployment and maintenance costs. However, WMNs suffer from scalability issues as the network grows. Therefore, in this paper, we present a scalable protocol stack for the IEEE 802.11s-based AMI applications. We propose several modifications and parameter adjustments at different layers of the protocol stack. Specifically, several parameters at the MAC layer are adjusted. Furthermore, we integrate a modified Address Resolution Protocol to take advantage of Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol's proactive route requests/replies, which is IEEE 802.11s standards default routing protocol. Moreover, we propose five novel retransmission timeout (RTO) calculation functions for the application layer protocol, CoAP, in order to increase the reliability. We assessed the performance of the proposed protocol stack under the widely used ns-3 simulator. The simulation results have shown that the proposed stack can reliably scale to thousands of nodes.