Optimal placement of data aggregators in smart grid on hybrid wireless and wired communication

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the main applications of smart grids. AMI enables the transmission of commands to smart meters, that is, a two-way communication is established. The meters data is aggregated in some intermediate nodes called Data Aggregation Point (DAP) and then forwarded to the control center. DAP placement is one of the greatest challenges for the smart grid networks. The manual analysis of the best DAPs positions is costly and hard to execute in practice, especially in high-density neighborhoods. General formulation of this problem leads to an NP-hard problem. In the current study, first we investigate some of the existing literatures in this area and then present an optimization problem to find the best location for aggregators in a hybrid wireless and wired communication network including fiber optic and WIMAX. To the best of our knowledge, there is no work that presents an optimal placement of data aggregator in a hybrid wireless and wired network that helps the customers and the microgrid to communicate within themselves with less delay in getting energy services and less overhead to the data aggregator points. Numerical results show that our proposed communication network infrastructure and DAP placement model minimizes cost and data aggregator density.