Trilateral Smart Switching Algorithm for Improving Smart Meters Efficiency in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) Network

Throughout implementation of the IPv6 routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) on AMI network, parent selection acts as the critical function which aims to achieve reliable data transmission and energy-efficient objective of AMI network where the data should be transmitted with high PDR and low latency while the network lifetime should be long with workload-balanced network. According to the target objectives of AMI network, traditional single-parent selections fail to achieve a tradeoff between transmission performance, including PDR and latency, and energy-efficient. On the other hand, the multi-parent selection scheme has the disadvantage of unnecessary energy consumption on transmission overhead under high channel quality. In this paper, we propose trilateral smart switching (TSS) by modifying the evaluation concept of fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and exploiting a cognitive radio. TSS algorithm outperforms the tradeoff issue of existing single-parent and multi-parent selections by hybrid selecting parents, transmission scheme and communication channel. Under high channel quality, TSS activates a single-parent transmission on Zigbee channel for achieving energy-efficient objective. When the workload of parents becomes imbalanced or the channel quality worsens, TSS switches the transmission scheme and channel between multi-parent transmission on Zigbee and single-parent transmission on cognitive radio for balancing the workload and maintaining high transmission quality. Once the TSS provides high workload balancing ability, TSS achieves long network lifetime. Moreover, TSS provides high transmission performance—high PDR and low latency— by opportunistic transmitting on cognitive radio for all channel qualities.