A study on the efficient wireless sensor networks for operation monitoring and control in smart grid applications

Low cost and collaborative nature of wireless sensor network makes it promising reliable, secure and self-healing two-way communication for monitoring and controlling of the equipment in the smart grid. But for time critical applications like grid fault isolation and recovery, demand response, wide area situational awareness demand low latency enabled faster communication network infrastructure. The grid can be really smart enough when we can control the grid in real time without any potential blackout. To meet this challenge this paper evaluates the performance of IEEE standard 802.15.4 wireless sensor networks with varying network sizes. NS2 (Network Simulator 2) has been employed to evaluate the performance of the wireless sensor networks using various ad-hoc routing protocols. The paper then analyzes the results and finally reaches to a conclusion about the potential areas where wireless sensor network can be deployed for efficient operation monitoring and control of the smart grid.