Effect of cooperative communications on power consumption in smart grid

Improvement in wireless communication and smart grid systems create an important machine to machine market potential. Smart grids allow controlling energy distribution and power requirements without human intervention by using smart meters. There are some requirements in communication protocol and network design to build smart grids machine to machine communication. Compared to other wireless communication systems, ZigBee is ideal for smart grid systems because of consuming less power and supporting mesh networks. In this paper, bit error rate performance evaluations are made for node to node test scenario for ZigBee to see ZigBee performance for smart grid applications. Moreover to exemplify different power consumption requirements for diverse applications, 3 service types are defined and corresponding power consumptions are analyzed for direct communication, decode & forward and amplify & forward techniques in cooperative communication systems.