Evaluating Performance of Wireless Sensor Network in Realistic Smart Grid Environment

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a strong candidate for smart grid applications, such as advanced metering infrastructure, demand response management, dynamic pricing, load control, electricity fraud detection, fault diagnostics, substation monitoring and control as well as automation of various elements of the power grid. The realization of these applications directly depends on efficiency of communication facilities among power grid elements. However, the harsh power grid environmental conditions with obstacles, noise, interference, and fading pose great challenges to reliability of these facilities to monitor and control the power grid. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate performance of WSNs in different power grid environments such as 500 kv substations, main power control room, and underground network transformer vaults. The power grid environments are modeled using a log-normal shadowing path loss model channel with realistic parameters. The network is simulated and performance is evaluated using packet delivery ratio, communication delay, and energy consumption. The simulation results have revealed that different environments have considerable impacts on performance of WSNs which make it suitable for most applications that need low data rate with low reliability requirements.