Cellular-Assisted D2D Communications for Advanced Metering Infrastructure in Smart Gird

In smart grid, an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) facilitates two-way communications between smart meters (SMs) and a meter data management unit (MDMU). We use cellular-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communications to connect a large number of SMs to the MDMU via cluster heads (CHs). Improper clustering can affect spectral efficiency. In addition, each SM and CH must be provided with a throughput guarantee for reliable smart grid operations. In this paper, we formulate a joint D2D cluster formation and radio resource allocation problem to maximize spectral efficiency in terms of uplink sum-rate, subject to constraints of guaranteeing a minimum throughput to each AMI entity. The optimization problem is a mixed-integer non-linear program, which is non-deterministic polynomial-time hard. For practical implementation and real-time decision making, we divide the original problem into four sub-problems: cluster formation, initial power allocation, channel allocation, and power allocation improvement, respectively. In the sub-problem for power allocation improvement, we exploit the properties of the difference of convex functions in finding the optimal transmission power. Simulation results confirm superiority of the proposed algorithm compared with other existing algorithms.