Performance comparison of routing protocols over smart utility networks: A simulation study

With the rapid increase in deployment of smart meters across North America, utility resources such as water, gas and electricity consumption data is being collected at a much higher granular level. The huge amount of data is being used to make demand-response applications smarter. A large part of this deployment of smart utility networks and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is being done using the wireless mesh architecture due to the low deployment costs offered by this method. Although wireless environment parameters such as fading and path loss differ widely from home, outdoor to industrial, in-building scenarios, efficient protocols at the Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical (PHY) layers and lower layer agnostic data routing protocols can be employed to overcome these challenges. For such routing protocols to be applicable to smart utility networks, reliability and scalability are vital metrics which will determine the performance in such networks. In this paper, we analyze reliability and scalability of three such routing protocols, viz. RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks), LOAD (6LoWPAN Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing) and a proprietary flavor of Geographical Routing.