Hybrid Wi-Fi/LTE aggregation architecture for smart meter communications

The 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology and its evolutions are promising candidate technologies to support smart meter communications. However, smart meter traffic is uplink heavy and needs large number of simultaneously connected users. This reduces LTE's potential to be employed for smart meter communications. To improve the overall performance, in this paper, we propose a hybrid WiFi-LTE aggregation data communication architecture. Specifically, two IEEE 802.11 based layers (IEEE 802.11b/g/n and IEEE 802.11s) are added to the bottom of the LTE architecture to aggregate local smart grid data and pass the aggregated data through limited number of LTE enabled nodes. These hybrid network architectures are evaluated using extensive ns-3 simulations, and their performance are compared with baseline LTE under smart grid traffic profile. Results show that proposed architectures can improve control channel and random access channel performance, at the cost of tolerable latency degradation.

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