A testbed based performance evaluation of smart grid wireless neighborhood area networks routing protocols

Smart Grid networks have a data communication network associated with the electrical energy distribution infrastructure. This network connects all the sub- scribers’ homes with the data control centers of the supplying companies, which in turn have access to the global Internet network. They are in charge of transporting the needed information between the elements that comprise the electricity network and the control centers. A part of these networks is the so-called Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs), which transports the data from the subscriber’s home to some data concentrators. This article presents a comparison of the performance of different routing protocols that can be used in this part of the data network, when a wireless technology is selected. For this comparison, a hardware testbed has been implemented, with a simple initial configuration, which allows the comparison of the OLSR v1, OLSR v2 and HWMP protocols. The numerical results are presented in terms of network throughput, protocol overhead, number of retransmissions, net- work transit and packet transfer times.This work was supported by the Spanish Research Council under project MAGOS (TEC2017-84197-C4-3-R), and Juan Pablo Astudillo León is the recipient of a full scholarship from the Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (SENESCYT), Ecuador.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Performance evaluation of Wireless Mesh Network routing protocol for smart grid networks

Recent Advances in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) makes it one of the candidate communication technologies for Smart Grid Automatic Metering Infrastructure (AMI) because of its scalability and low cost of deployment. However, its capacity and multi-hoping performance in dynamic environment may not guarantee resilience and packet delivery reliability requirements of AMI. Theoretical and practical studies have shown that the multi-hoping capacity of a mesh network is constrained by increase in the number of nodes and number of hops in the network. In addition traffic requirements for smart meters will further compound WMN multi-hopping issues. In this paper, the performance of WMN when deployed for AMI is carried out using two wireless routing protocols; Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) and Optimised Link State Rout protocol (OLSR) in NS-3. Simulation results show that compared to the reliability requirement of AMI, there is need for improving the routing metric for both protocols. Furthermore, The Dynamic Link Exchange Protocol (DLEP) which allows layer 2 link estimation was proposed to enhance the route decision

DIFFERENTIATED RETRANSMISSION IN WIRELESS MESH NETWORKS

Techniques are described herein for enabling diverse retries at a lower layer based on possibilities provided by routing operations. An anycast model is used to indicate a set of next hops and forwarding interfaces that enable indicating raw constraints such as bounded latency to perform a transmission

Advances in wireless community networks with the community-lab testbed

Beyond traditional telecom providers, citizens and organizations pool their own resources and coordinate in order to build local network infrastructures to address the digital divide in many parts of the world. These crowdsourced network infrastructures can be self-organized and shared by a community for the collective benefit of its members. Several of these networks have developed open, free, and neutral agreements, and are governed as a common-pool resource: community networks. These are built using a variety of commodity wireless hardware (e.g., Wi-Fi long-range point-to-point links, Wi-Fi and GSM access points, and mesh networks), sometimes optical fiber links, heterogeneous nodes, routing protocols, and applications. A group of researchers, developers, and community networks developed the Community-Lab testbed, and for the last five years have worked together to overcome obstacles, improve the technologies, tools, and operational models being used, as well as model best practices for more effective and sustainable community networks. This article presents the challenges for experimentation, the testbeds built, results, lessons learned, and the impact of that work to place wireless community networks as one sustainable way toward an Internet accessible to all.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

QoS Provisioning in Converged Satellite and Terrestrial Networks: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art

It has been widely acknowledged that future networks will need to provide significantly more capacity than current ones in order to deal with the increasing traffic demands of the users. Particularly in regions where optical fibers are unlikely to be deployed due to economical constraints, this is a major challenge. One option to address this issue is to complement existing narrow-band terrestrial networks with additional satellite connections. Satellites cover huge areas, and recent developments have considerably increased the available capacity while decreasing the cost. However, geostationary satellite links have significantly different link characteristics than most terrestrial links, mainly due to the higher signal propagation time, which often renders them not suitable for delay intolerant traffic. This paper surveys the current state-of-the-art of satellite and terrestrial network convergence. We mainly focus on scenarios in which satellite networks complement existing terrestrial infrastructures, i.e., parallel satellite and terrestrial links exist, in order to provide high bandwidth connections while ideally achieving a similar end user quality-of-experience as in high bandwidth terrestrial networks. Thus, we identify the technical challenges associated with the convergence of satellite and terrestrial networks and analyze the related work. Based on this, we identify four key functional building blocks, which are essential to distribute traffic optimally between the terrestrial and the satellite networks. These are the traffic requirement identification function, the link characteristics identification function, as well as the traffic engineering function and the execution function. Afterwards, we survey current network architectures with respect to these key functional building blocks and perform a gap analysis, which shows that all analyzed network architectures require adaptations to effectively support converged satellite and terrestrial networks. Hence, we conclude by formulating several open research questions with respect to satellite and terrestrial network convergence.This work was supported by the BATS Research Project through the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under Contract 317533

A Distributed Caching Approach for Improved Data Availability in Rural Wireless Mesh Networks

The performance of wireless mesh networks (WMNs) deployed for Internet access in rural settings is affected by several factors. Typically, deployments in African domains use cheap and computationally constrained devices with challenges such as power fluctuations, gateway congestion, VSAT communications asymmetry and low bandwidth, which affects throughput under dynamic scenarios. Caching methods can offer improvement for content availability to ensure a reliable quality of experience (QoE) for rural dwellers. Primarily, we integrate a modified multicast technique and overhearing for object caching and cache dissemination. We proposed a Distributed Overheard-object Caching Approach (DOCA) and evaluated the performance employing simulations. The outcome shows significant improvements over the random-path-cache-request (RPCR) strategy with increased data availability and reduced communication cost regarding response time for the outlined rural scenarios. Moreover, the optimization of gateway load helps to conserve network resources such as bandwidth and nodal energy considerably

Performance Evaluation of Wireless Mesh Network Routing Protocols for Smart Grid AMI Networks

Recent Advances in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) makes it one of the candidate communication technologies for Smart Grid Automatic Metering Infrastructure (AMI) because of its scalability and low cost of deployment. However, its capacity and multi-hoping performance in dynamic environment may not guarantee resilience and packet delivery reliability requirements of AMI. Theoretical and practical studies have shown that the multi-hoping capacity of a mesh network is constrained by increase in the number of nodes and number of hops in the network. In addition traffic requirements for smart meters will further compound WMN multi-hopping issues. In this paper, the performance of WMN when deployed for AMI is carried out using two wireless routing protocols; Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) and Optimised Link State Rout protocol (OLSR) in NS-3. Simulation results show that compared to the reliability requirement of AMI, there is need for improving the routing metric for both protocols. Furthermore, The Dynamic Link Exchange Protocol (DLEP) which allows layer 2 link estimation was proposed to enhance the route decision

Reactive Networking using Dynamic Link Exchange Protocol

This master thesis studies the possibilities of using a radio-router protocol in order to increase the quality of service in dynamic tactical network environments. We cover three radio-router protocols with emphasis on Dynamic Link Exchange Protocol (DLEP). Many applications, such as voice and video communication, have bandwidth and latency requirements which need to be fulfilled in order to provide a sufficient level of quality. This poses a problem in tactical network environments where links are typically dynamic and both bandwidth andlatency can vary. A radio-router protocol can alleviate this problem and also improve the routing in a network by allowing routers to take part of link-layer information. By using a radio link emulator (RLE) developed by Saab we are able to simulate dynamic network environments. We have performed two experiments by combining the RLE and an implementation of a subset ofthe DLEP specification draft. Both experiments simulate typical military network scenarios and allow us to analyse the effects of utilizing link-layerfeedback.Our results show that by using DLEP it is possible to provide better quality of service in highly dynamic conditions. We also show that DLEP can influence Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) by making OLSR aware of changes in the network topology. This leads to a reduced network convergence time with only a small increase in OLSR overhead