Opportunistic spectrum access enabled heterogeneous wireless networking for smart grid

Communication in smart grid is regarded as a backbone since the choice of communication technology in smart grid is highly critical to provide secure, reliable and efficient bi-directional information transfer between the smart grid components. However, current communication infrastructures and standards are incapable of meeting the strict requirements of smart grid systems. The dynamic/opportunistic spectrum access in heterogeneous wireless networks is a candidate technology that can be used to reduce the communication expenses (by reusing the existing infrastructures) and to improve overall performance of smart grid. In this paper, we investigate the mathematical model for the dynamic spectrum access and the impact of bandwidth accumulation in smart grid communications to maximize payoff/throughput. We evaluate the proposed approaches through simulations. The numerical results show that the proposed opportunistic spectrum access-based smart grid communication outperforms the static smart grid communications.