Simulation-Based Performance Analysis Of Wireless Routing Protocols For Smart Metering Applications

There is a growing interest for smart metering applications in wireless environment recently. Wireless smart meter devices are easy to use solutions for recording energy consumption and report back the amount to the utility on a daily basis. This kind of usage of smart meter devices can be considered as a special subset of wireless sensor networks (WSN). The communication protocol used in smart meter networks has to be fast, reliable and secure. The challenge in developing such a protocol is the difficulty to debug software on multiple wireless nodes at the same time. This difficulty highlights the importance of the simulation-based approach. The most laborious part of the wireless communication is the routing protocol in the network layer when it comes to implementation. In this paper different wireless communication routing protocols are compared by simulation including naive Flooding, Gradient-Based Routing (GBR) and Directed Diffusion (DD). The simulation results show that GBR and DD have a superior performance over flooding as expected, and that GBR and DD has similar efficiency in a smart metering application. Since GBR is easier to implement it is the recommended solution for routing in a smart metering network

A scalable multi-sink gradient-based routing protocol for traffic load balancing

Abstract Wireless sensor networks have been assumed to consist of a single sink and multiple sensor nodes which do not have mobility. In these networks, sensor nodes near the sink dissipate their energy so fast due to their many-to-one traffic pattern, and finally they die early. This uneven energy depletion phenomenon known as the hot spot problem becomes more serious as the number of sensor nodes (i.e., their scale) increases. Recently, multi-sink wireless sensor networks have been envisioned to solve the hot spot problem. Gradient routing protocols are known to be appropriate for the networks in that network traffic is evenly distributed to multiple sinks to prolong network lifetime and they are scalable. Each node maintains its gradient representing the direction toward a neighbor node to reach one of the sinks. In particular, existing protocols allow a sensor node to construct its gradient using the cumulative traffic load of a path for load balancing. However, they have a critical drawback that a sensor node cannot efficiently avoid using the path with the most overloaded node. Hence, this paper introduces a new Gradient routing protocol for LOad-BALancing (GLOBAL) with a new gradient model to maximize network lifetime. The proposed gradient model considers both of the cumulative path load and the traffic load of the most overloaded node over the path in calculating each node's gradient value. Therefore, packets are forwarded over the least-loaded path, which avoids the most overloaded node. In addition, it is known that assigning a unique address to each sensor node causes much communication overhead. Since the overhead increases as the network scales, routing protocols using an address to indicate the receiver in forwarding a packet are not scalable. Thus, GLOBAL also includes an addressing-free data forwarding strategy. Through ns-2 simulation, we verify that GLOBAL achieves better performance than the shortest path routing and load-aware gradient routing ones.</p