Addressing Network Interoperability in Hybrid IEEE 802.11s/LTE Smart Grid Communications

Ensuring network interoperability when IEEE 802.11s-based NAN and LTE-based WAN is deployed for Smart Grid (SG) Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) poses significant challenges. Besides the QoS mismatch between networks, LTE tunneling mechanism becomes an issue when forwarding downlink traffic to IEEE 802.11s network since the gateway of these networks is supposed to be the end device in LTE setup. Yet, inherent security/privacy overhead in SG traffic makes it even more challenging. To address these issues, a novel UE access list is proposed for LTE network to enable the downlink traffic identification to IEEE 802.11s network and accordingly selects the corresponding gateway. For the QoS mismatch, Dual-Queues (DQs) for each Access Category of the underlying MAC protocol, namely Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) in IEEE 802.11s network is proposed. By using ns-3 network simulator, extensive performance evaluations under heavy security overhead are conducted to assess the performance of the proposed mechanisms.