A new, simple and effective communication protocol is developed and evaluated for implementation in power line communication (PLC) based automatic meter reading (AMR) systems. The protocol involves request broadcasting by the data concentrator (DC) and subsequent re-broadcasting by lower level meters up till the third hop using a novel dual purpose packet for transmission. The proposed routing protocol employs CSMA-CA medium access control protocol for data transmission. The simulation model presents an unstructured network topology of the PLC access network assuming automatic 3-level clustering mechanism. The metering unit with “silent node” problem is represented by a two-state transition Markov model. The performance of the proposed routing protocol in terms of data collection delay and throughput is analyzed and compared with that of the Clustered Simple Polling (CSP) protocol. The proposed routing protocol ensures significantly higher performance than the CSP protocol, which results with a reduced data collection delay.
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