An LTE-based Multicast Scheduling Technique for Critical Smart Grid Communications

The management and control of the renewable energy sources in smart grid are currently the most challenging topics in this area of research. Since renewable energy sources are potentially located away from urban areas, cellular communications are most suitable for this purpose. In this paper, we propose an LTE-based priority and delay oriented multicast scheduling technique designed specifically for smart grid management purposes. Using multicast communications in smart grid is most suitable since various messages should be sent to multiple renewable energy sources simultaneously. This is to ensure that these sources are coordinated in performing the same action within a certain time constraint to avoid any power shortages or other issues within the system. We evaluate our proposed technique and compare it with other general purpose multicast scheduling techniques. Results show that the proposed technique offers an enhanced performance over other techniques in delivering smart grid traffic while maintaining good performance for the other real-time traffic, such as voice traffic, within the network.