Comparison of data forwarding mechanisms for AMI networks

Abstract

Advance Metering Infrastructure (AMI) networks are often deployed under challenging and unreliable conditions. One of the issues for the transmission of data packet in these unreliable networks is the routing of packets, because routing paths may behave differently from the time when the route is discovered to the time when a data packet is forwarded. In addition, control packets may get lost and give routers an inconsistent view of the network. While previous research has focused on designing the controlplane of routing protocols to deal with the AMI network conditions, there is comparatively a smaller amount of research on the advantages of new data forwarding mechanisms designed for unreliable networks. This paper introduces a set of data forwarding mechanisms inspired by distributed depth-first search algorithms, and designed for the challenging conditions of large-scale unreliable networks envisioned by smart-grid deployments. These forwarding mechanisms use data packets to detect loops, update routing tables, and perform rerouting of data packets through alternate paths, recovering thus, packets that would have been normally dropped due to failures at the link layer. We perform simulations based on a real field AMI deployment to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanisms. We also provide the evaluation results for the data forwarding mechanisms that have been implemented in a real AMI network.

Properties of advanced metering infrastructure networks' topologies

“…a uniform random distribution [8] or a grid deployment [9]), or to take the position data from real installations (e.g. [10]), which in general is not available publicly.…”

Analytical performance analysis of a large-scale RF-mesh smart meter communication system

“…Others have dealt with real-time trial measurements. For instance, [5] reported some results obtained in a real AMI while [6] combined the simulation approach with real-time measurements. Our methodology is totally analytic and, in that respect, it is based on fundamental findings of wireless networks performance.…”

Performance analysis of AMI distributed area network using WiMAX technology

“…).Reliability of WiMAX to collect large number of metering data is analyzed in [3]. Vijaya kumar, et al [6] simulated the access network of AMI with 11 smart devices communicating through a ZigBee technology.…”