Quality of Service Networking for Smart Grid Distribution Monitoring

In order to realize the Smart Grid vision, it is necessary to have guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) for the communication and networking technology used in various stages of the Smart Grid, ranging from power generation, transmission, distribution, to the customer applications. The low cost wireless protocols such as Zigbee (using IEEE 802.15.4 defined physical and MAC layer) and Bluetooth (IEEE802.15.1) are especially useful for the power distribution system monitoring and customer applications. However, they do not support QoS and typically have a short propagation distance. In this paper, we propose to add the QoS into these low cost protocols by providing differentiated service for traffic of different priority at the MAC layer and use Zigbee as an example. Our analytical delay model and simulation results show that the proposed QoS enhancement can improve the delay and goodput of the network, thus ensuring the reliability, availability, and performance of a Smart Grid distribution monitoring and control.