Aggregation Points Planning for Smart Grid Communications: Wired and Wireless Cases

Aggregation Point (AP) plays a vital role in smart grid, which forwards data stream between the client terminals and the control center in smart grid communication system. In this paper, we investigate two representative AP planning models: wired and wireless, and develop efficient algorithms to address the formulated AP planning problems in a cost-efficient way. For the wired case, a 5-approximation algorithm is proposed to minimize the total capital expenditure with the consideration of the installation cost of each AP in the neighborhood area networks (NANs) and the connecting cost between the AP and the home area network (HANs) served by it. For the wireless media-based networking scenario, an O(log W)-approximation algorithm is presented to minimize the total deployment cost of the opening APs under their coverage constraints, where W is the maximum capacity among these APs. Numerical results show that our proposed approximation algorithms have great advantages compared to other heuristic methods.