Investigation of Smart Meter Data Reporting Strategies for Optimized Performance in Smart Grid AMI Networks

Designing efficient and reliable wireless mesh-based advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) networks is challenging. In AMI networks, fine-grained regular data collections from smart meters (SMs) create a lot of traffic and interference. The location of the gateway that collects data from SMs may also add to this interference by impacting the length of routes. Furthermore, TCP-like protocols that are employed for reliability may bring additional overhead. Therefore, it is critical to pick the suitable data collection strategy and gateway location to meet some smart grid performance requirements. In this paper, we proposed three novel data collection mechanisms to set the periodic reporting time of each SM to improve TCP performance in IEEE 802.11s-based wireless mesh AMI networks. The first idea was based on the nature of IEEE 802.11s routing protocol. Each SM is assigned a reporting time based on its location in the spanning tree network. The second idea was inspired by the time division multiple access methods where each meter is given a separate slot. The third idea was based on both previous ideas and clustering to increase the number of meters that can send at the same slot. For the gateway location, we also proposed a novel mechanism based on ${p}$ -center facility problem to minimize data delivery delay. The simulation results indicate that the packet delay can be improved significantly without any negative impact on the other performance metrics.