Attainable throughput, delay and scalability for geographic routing on Smart Grid neighbor area networks

Challenges of the existing power grid demand the integration of information and communication technologies into the next-generation electric grid, namely the Smart Grid (SG). This paper focuses on the critical communications segment corresponding to the consumer-premise, the Neighbor Area Network (NAN). For this segment, Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol is considered for its low complexity and high scalability. In order to provide guidelines for SG communications system designers and network engineers, the performance of GPSR in terms of throughput, latency and scalability is investigated with parametric sweeps of transmission range, data rate and the number of Smart Meters (SMs) per Data Aggregation Point (DAP). The simulation results show that network throughput of hundreds of times the rate required for basic SG applications (e.g., meter reading, service switch, ...) can be achieved while the end-to-end delay can always be maintained below 100 ms. However, the converge-cast nature of the uplink traffic severely limits the SM-to-DAP ratio. Thus, with GPSR at the NAN level, emerging SG applications such as smart metering, real-time pricing, demand response, etc., can be supported.