Design and Analysis of a Wireless Monitoring Network for Transmission Lines in the Smart Grid

This chapter designs a monitoring network for the transmission lines in the smart grid, taking advantage of the existing utility backbone network. The designed monitoring network consists of hundreds of wireless sensor nodes that are deployed on top of selected power line transmission towers. The most imperative requirement of the transmission line monitoring network is timely delivery of data while being energy efficient. The chapter proposes several centralized power allocation schemes including two optimization problems, that minimize the total power consumption, a game theoretical scheme, and two relaxed schemes that converge to solutions quickly in a large scale network. A distributed power allocation scheme is proposed to improve the power efficiency of each sensor node for realistic cases with dynamic traffic. The chapter presents a case study to demonstrate the performance of the distributed scheme.