Development and analysis of Wireless Mesh Networks with load-balancing for AMI in smart grid

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) are used for data communication in Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). AMI network generates lot of data and these data are transmitted between smart meters and utility center bidirectionally. This heavy traffic may cause a overload condition in some data forwarding meters which leads to congestion. In this paper a load balanced routing is introduced in the path identified by the Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) which uses airtime link metric as path selection parameter to avoid congestion. The proposed Load Aware HWMP (LA-HWMP) uses a hash table for every source which has loads of each link that participate in the path between the meter and gateway in both directions. While balancing the load, link with low airtime link metric is sacrificed and the channel is utilized at maximum. Simulation is carried out on a large AMI network with a random wireless mesh topology. From the results it is proved that for every transmission, an even loaded path is identified for the whole simulation time. When an even load is assigned to all the links that participate in a transmission, a unit amount of load index is achieved.