MAC protocol for advanced metering infrastructure: Requirements and functionalities

With the development of power line communication (PLC) technologies, the data rate and delay performance of PLC network have been greatly improved. Besides, there is no need for PLC to build a totally new network. As a result, PLC based advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) has attracted more and more attention. However, due to the usage of existing power line for signal transmitting, the PLC channel is influenced by grid structure, impedance, colored background noise, narrowband noise, impulsive noises, and so on. These make the PLC channel being time-varying, place-dependent and frequency-selective. It is a great challenge to design AMI system and its MAC protocol. In this paper, we firstly summarize and analyze PLC channel characteristics and the requirements of AMI services on MAC protocol. Secondly, based on the requirements, we propose additional functionalities that MAC protocol for AMI should have, such as adaption to the channel status, frequency cognition, multi-frequency communication with single-frequency device, initiative reporting service, and hybrid quality of service (QoS). Thirdly, we propose a MAC frame structure, which can enable the above mentioned additional functionalities to cope with the frequency-selective and place-dependent PLC channel, and thus to improve the access probability, end-to-end throughput and delay performance.