A delay mitigation scheme for WSN-based smart grid substation monitoring

The Quality of Service (QoS) in smart grid communications especially in monitoring smart grid assets is becoming significantly important for emerging smart grid applications. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are expected to be widely utilized in a broad range of smart grid applications due to their numerous advantages along with their successful adoption in various critical areas including military and health. WSNs protocols are not designed to provide QoS provisioning for monitoring applications. Thus, the use of WSNs in transmitting delay-critical data from smart grid assets calls for data prioritization and delay-mitigation schemes. In this paper, we propose a delay-responsive, cross layer scheme with linear backoff (LDRX) mechanism to address delay and service requirements of the smart grid monitoring applications. The LDRX scheme is designed to operate in cluster-tree WSN topology that is suitable for monitoring wide areas such as electrical substations or large installations. We show that LDRX has greater impact on delay reduction compared to previously proposed WSNs delay reduction schemes.