Feasibility study of applying LTE to Smart Grid

Smart Grid (SG) is characterized by two-way flow of electricity and information and is capable of monitoring everything from power plants and customer preference to individual appliances. In this paper, we focus on applying 3GPP LTE release 8 technology to build a high-reliable and low-latency Distribution Automation (DA) network. Based on the documents released by Nation Institute of Standard and Technologies, the communication requirements of DA are obtained, which include traffic distributions, latency constraint and reliability requirement. The latency and reliability requirements are tightly coupled in the DA network. In order to mitigate queueing delay, we reserve bandwidth only for the devices with low duty cycle random traffics. By maintaining all field devices in RRC-CONNECTED state, the scheduling delay can be decreased to 66 ms as maximum, this leaves time to complete three retransmissions of devices´ data. Finally, the uplink and downlink cell-edge Interference-plus-Noise Ratios are estimated through system level simulation. The reliability requirements of DA can be satisfied with 4-by-2 Transmission Mode 6 system in downlink, and with 1-by-4 system in uplink, respectively. Therefore, we conclude that LTE is a promising candidate to build a wireless DA network.