A Novel Power-Saving Scheduling Scheme in Large Scale Smart-Grid Networks

The IEEE 802.11ah Task Group is going to specify a global WLAN standard. However, .ah drafts still employs the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) medium access protocol, which is an energy-consuming protocol and not suitable for networks where STAs are generally battery supplied. Besides, since .ah could support up to 6000 stations at most to be scheduled within one BSS, the introduced overhead and corresponding processing delay are non-trivial. In this paper, a power saving scheduling scheme is proposed which could greatly reduce the introduced overhead while successfully scheduling the uplink/downlink traffic of meters. Our model could also save the station’s battery with best efforts thus making our protocol specifically suitable for Smart-Grid networks where battery changing for stations is difficult. Numerical results show that our scheme outperforms the PSM (Power Saving Mechanism) and PSMP (Power Save Multi-Poll) protocols in terms of overheads, throughput and energy consumptions.

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