Machine-to-Machine Communication over TV White Spaces for Smart Metering Applications

Machine-to-Machine communications is envisioned to become one of the fundamental pillars of the future Internet of Things paradigm, enabling platoons of devices to be seamlessly connected and to cooperate over smart spaces. Among the possible application scenarios, smart metering represents an already existing technology that might take benefit from the capability of autonomous configuration and setup of M2M networks. At present, smart meters communicate over the 2G/3G network, however the utilization of the cellular technology poses several problems, such as low coverage and spectrum shortage over dense areas. To overcome these issues, in this paper we investigate the application of cognitive radio principles over TV White Spaces to M2M communication for the smart metering scenario. Following the recent regulations of FCC and Ofcom, that foresees the presence of a spectrum database for TV white spaces detection, we study the trade-off between protection of licensees and energy consumption in a cluster of smart meters. We provide three novel research contributions: (i) an analytical model to estimate the lifetime of a cluster of smart meters; (ii) centralized and distributed algorithms to determine the schedule operations of Master/Slave devices foreseen by the spectrum regulations; (iii) performance evaluation of the proposed framework through extensive Omnet++ simulations.