Performance Evaluation of the Contention-Based Random Access of LTE Under Smart Grid Traffic

Power distribution networks are often widely distributed to accommodate electrical power feeds to dense cities while monitoring and control systems typically require extensive information exchange among numerous intelligent electronic devices. Using the existing network infrastructure, cellular technology appears as a key enabler for the support of large-scale metering deployments and wide-area monitoring systems. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the contention-based random-access mechanism of LTE networks for real-time monitoring and metering applications. In particular, the impact of smart grid traffic is investigated in terms of access delay and outage probability under different network configurations and traffic characteristics. Simulations of realistic network-overload scenarios demonstrate that the random-access channel of LTE/LTE-A is prone to congestion when a high number of smart grid devices attempt for network access, while the bursty nature of monitoring traffic results in even higher performance degradation.