Quality of service differentiation for smart grid neighbor area networks through multiple RPL instances

The Smart Grid (SG) aims to transform the current electric grid into a “smarter” network where the integration of renewable energy resources, energy efficiency and fault tolerance are the main benefits. This is done by interconnecting every energy source, storage point or central control point with connected devices, where heterogeneous SG applications and signalling messages will have different requirements in terms of reliability, latency and priority. Hence, data routing and prioritization are the main challenges in such networks. So far, RPL (Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy networks) protocol is widely used on Smart Grids for distributing commands over the grid. RPL assures traffic differentiation at the network layer in wireless sensor networks through the logical subdivision of the network in multiple instances, each one relying on a specific Objective Function. However, RPL is not optimized for Smart Grids, as its main objective functions and their associated metric does not allow Quality of Service differentiation. To overcome this, we propose OFQS an objective function with a multi-objective metric that considers the delay and the remaining energy in the battery nodes alongside with the dynamic quality of the communication links. Our function automatically adapts to the number of instances (traffic classes) providing a Quality of Service differentiation based on the different Smart Grid applications requirements. We tested our approach on a real sensor testbed. The experimental results show that our proposal provides a lower packet delivery latency and a higher packet delivery ratio while extending the lifetime of the network compared to solutions in the literature.

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Quality-of-Service Differentiation for Smart Grid Neighbor Area Networks

Journal of Science and Technology Issue on Information and Communications Technology ◽

10.31130/jst.2016.21 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 2 (1) ◽

pp. 20 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Gowdemy Rajalingham ◽

Quang-Dung Ho ◽

Tho Le-Ngoc

Keyword(s):

Quality Of Service ◽

Smart Grid ◽

Large Scale ◽

Service Differentiation ◽

Traffic Load ◽

Network Graph ◽

Lossy Networks ◽

Vast Number ◽

Rural Region

Neighbor Area Networks (NAN) play a crucial role in the Smart Grid Communications Network (SGCN) and provide connectivity for a vast number of smart meters (SMs) while meeting the varying Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of different types of Smart Grid (SG) applications. To that effect, this paper explores the incorporation of QoS differentiation at the network layer in order to shape and control traffic of multiple classes in an end-to-end manner for the SG NAN using the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). In particular, this paper proposes QoS enabling extensions, RPL-M and RPL-M+, within the RPL framework by associating multiple network graph instances to different SG application requirements. For illustration, the paper considers two deployment scenarios: large-scale dense urban area and microgrid-based remote rural region. Simulation-centric performance evaluation, in terms of latency and throughput, is performed for periodic and critical traffic classes, for two distinct grid conditions, with increasing data traffic load. The rural region is chosen to highlight achievable performance for microgrids and the transferability of results to different grid architectures.

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