Performance Analysis of IEEE 802.11af Standard Based Neighbourhood Area Network for Smart Grid Applications

A neighbourhood area network (NAN) connects all the end users with energy suppliers and/or distributed generation. In this paper, we propose an IEEE 802.11af based NAN for Smart Grid applications in Low Voltage electricity networks and analyze its packet delivery and delay performance against the Smart Grid requirements. The IEEE 802.11af is implemented in ns3 and its performance for carrying Smart Grid traffic is simulated and analyzed. The simulation results show that the proposed NAN achieves over 99% PDR and below 200ms end-to-end delay for normal smart metering-like traffic, which adequately fulfils the requirement of best-effort applications in the Smart Grid. The results also provide quantitative insight into the tradeoff between coverage and performance, which can serve as guidelines for IEEE 802.11af NAN designs for Smart Grid deployment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that provides specific results for IEEE 802.11af performance as the last mile access network technology in a Smart Grid scenario.