Data Aggregation Point Placement for Smart Meters in the Smart Grid

Smart meters (SMs) measure and transmit fine-grained electricity consumption data to the data center at a certain high frequency (such as every 15 minutes). A data aggregation point (DAP) is a relay device between a cluster of SMs and data centers. The placement of DAPs significantly impacts the cost-effectiveness and quality of service (QoS) of the communication system. Nowadays, many newly installed SMs not only can send data to the DAPs but also receive/send data from/to other SMs. This paper proposes a novel approach for the optimal DAP placement in a multi-hop routing scenario, where SMs can serve as small relay devices so that communications among SMs can be leveraged to reduce the overall communication cost. To do so, we formulate a mixed-integer optimization problem that minimizes three types of cost: installation, transmission, and delay cost. Since the optimization problem involves too many binary variables to be efficiently solved to optimality, a heuristic approach is developed to obtain a desirable solution with a low computational burden. The heuristic iteratively implements clustering approximation, pole assignment, and optimal routing until convergence of the total cost value. Both an illustrative example and case studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.