Efficient Cooperative Anycasting for AMI Mesh Networks

We have, in recent years, witnessed an increased interest towards enabling a Smart Grid which will be a corner stone to build sustainable energy efficient communities. An integral part of the future Smart Grid will be the communications infrastructure which will make real time control of the grid components possible. Automated Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is thought to be a key enabler for monitoring and controlling the customer loads. %RPL is a connectivity enabling mechanism for low power and lossy networks currently being standardized by the IETF ROLL working group. RPL is deemed to be a suitable candidate for AMI networks where the meters are connected to a concentrator over multi hop low power and lossy links. This paper proposes an efficient cooperative anycasting approach for wireless mesh networks with the aim of achieving reduced traffic and increased utilisation of the network resources. The proposed cooperative anycasting has been realised as an enhancement on top of the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL), a connectivity enabling mechanism in wireless AMI mesh networks. In this protocol, smart meter nodes utilise an anycasting approach to facilitate efficient transport of metering data to the concentrator node. Moreover, it takes advantage of a distributed approach ensuring scalability

Use of Clustering-based Routing Protocols in Low Power and Lossy Networks � A Survey

Internet of Things (IoT) is the one of the emerging field today, which consists of various resource-constrained devices that are limited in resources and work in the lossy wireless network. Therefore, IoT requires efficient routing protocol so that devices can communicate fast and power efficiently. Among different protocols available for wireless networks, Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a protocol specially standardized by IETF for efficient communication between IoT devices. Routing technique is one of the important factors of a routing protocol, which affects the performance of a protocol. In recent years, researchers contributed to improving RPL performance by providing various solutions and clustering is one of those ways to improve RPL performance by using Cluster- parent based Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG). In this paper, we discuss the various clustering-based routing protocols in a Low power and lossy networks (LLNs) and concludes that this survey might be helpful for future researchers

Atomic-SDN: Is Synchronous Flooding the Solution to Software-Defined Networking in IoT?

The adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN) within traditional networks has provided operators the ability to manage diverse resources and easily reconfigure networks as requirements change. Recent research has extended this concept to IEEE 802.15.4 low-power wireless networks, which form a key component of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the multiple traffic patterns necessary for SDN control makes it difficult to apply this approach to these highly challenging environments. This paper presents Atomic-SDN, a highly reliable and low-latency solution for SDN in low-power wireless. Atomic-SDN introduces a novel Synchronous Flooding (SF) architecture capable of dynamically configuring SF protocols to satisfy complex SDN control requirements, and draws from the authors' previous experiences in the IEEE EWSN Dependability Competition: where SF solutions have consistently outperformed other entries. Using this approach, Atomic-SDN presents considerable performance gains over other SDN implementations for low-power IoT networks. We evaluate Atomic-SDN through simulation and experimentation, and show how utilizing SF techniques provides latency and reliability guarantees to SDN control operations as the local mesh scales. We compare Atomic-SDN against other SDN implementations based on the IEEE 802.15.4 network stack, and establish that Atomic-SDN improves SDN control by orders-of-magnitude across latency, reliability, and energy-efficiency metrics

Comparison of wireless data transmission protocols for residential water meter applications

This article provides a comparison of various wireless data transmission protocols, such as Wireless M-Bus, LoRaWAN, Sigfox, NB-IoT and a newly developed proprietary protocol, studying their performance in the application of battery-powered residential water meters. Key aspects of the comparison include energy consumption, which is analyzed through comparing unitary amount of charge required to conduct a single, bi-directional data transaction between the meter and base station, and maximum coupling loss which effectively defines the range and coverage in the system. For completeness, the study includes also a brief cost analysis and ends with a conclusion, stating when each of the particular standards should be favored

Advanced Metering Infrastructure Based on Smart Meters in Smart Grid

Due to lack of situational awareness, automated analysis, poor visibility, and mechanical switches, today\u27s electric power grid has been aging and ill‐suited to the demand for electricity, which has gradually increased, in the twenty‐first century. Besides, the global climate change and the greenhouse gas emissions on the Earth caused by the electricity industries, the growing population, one‐way communication, equipment failures, energy storage problems, the capacity limitations of electricity generation, decrease in fossil fuels, and resilience problems put more stress on the existing power grid. Consequently, the smart grid (SG) has emerged to address these challenges. To realize the SG, an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) based on smart meters is the most important key

A Framework for the Performance Analysis and Simulation of RF-Mesh Advanced Metering Infrastructures for Smart Grid Applications

RÉSUMÉ L’Infrastructure de Mesurage Avancée (IMA), conçue à l’origine pour lire à distance des compteurs intelligents, est actuellement considérée comme une composante essentielle dans le domaine des Smart Grid. Le but principal des IMAs est de connecter le grand nombre de compteurs intelligents installés chez les clients au le centre de contrôle de données de l’entreprise d’électricité et viceversa. Cette communication bidirectionnelle est une caractéristique recherchée par un grand nombre d’applications, qui visent à utiliser ces infrastructures comme support à la transmission de leurs données dans le réseau électrique, comme par exemple la gestion de la charge et la demande-réponse. Un grand nombre de technologies et de protocoles de communication sont actuellement utilisés dans les IMAs : parmi les solutions disponibles, le RF-Mesh est une des plus populaires, surtout grâce au bas coût pour l’installation et les équipements. Toutefois, le débit nominal des communications RF-Mesh est très bas, de l’ordre des dizaines de kbps, et la littérature qui traite leur performance est très limitée. Ceci pourrait en limiter l’utilisation pour des applications autres que la lecture à distance des compteurs intelligents. Ce travail de thèse vise à développer un système de modèles et outils pour évaluer la performance des réseaux RF-Mesh et encourager leur utilisation pour un grand nombre d’applications dans le domaine des Smart Grid. Le système d’évaluation de performance proposé est constitué (i) de modèles analytiques, pour calculer la probabilité de collision entre les paquets transmis, (ii) d’un simulateur de réseau, pour recréer le fonctionnement des réseaux RF-Mesh dans un environnement virtuel, (iii) d’un générateur de topologie, pour créer des cas réalistes en se basant sur des données géographiques et (iv) des méthodes pour l’analyse de la performance. Trois différents modèles analytiques ont été implémentés. Dans les deux premiers, une nouvelle formule analytique a été utilisée pour calculer la probabilité de collision entre paquets. La probabilité de collision est ensuite utilisée pour estimer le délai moyen de/vers chaque compteur intelligent dans l’IMA analysée. Par la suite, des indices de performance, basés sur le délai moyen, sont utilisés pour faire des analyses de performance : études de faisabilité pour les applications de Smart Grid, l’identification de noeuds critiques et d’éventuels goulots d’étranglement. Dans le troisième modèle analytique, la théorie de Markov-Modulated System est utilisée pour prendre en considération d’importants détails d’implémentation, comme la probabilité de retransmission et la taille des mémoires tampons des noeuds, qui n’avaient pas été inclus dans la modélisations précédente.----------ABSTRACT Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), originally conceived to replace the old Automated Meter Reading (AMR) infrastructures, have now become a key element in the Smart Grid context and might be used for applications other than remote meter reading. The main driver to their widespread installation is that they provide power utilities with a bidirectional connectivity with the smart meters. A wide variety of communication networks are currently proposed to support the implementation of AMIs, and, among them, the RF-Mesh technology seems to be very popular. The main reasons for its adoption are the proprietary infrastructure and the modest cost for the installation and the equipment. However, RF-Mesh systems are characterized by poor achievable data-rates in the order of 10 kbps, and their performance is not well studied in the literature. The lack of tools and methods for the performance evaluation might be a roadblock to their widespread adoption. This thesis aims at filling this gap and increase the knowledge of large-scale RF-Mesh systems to foster their use for a wide variety of applications. We propose a comprehensive framework for the performance evaluation of large-scale AMIs adopting the RF-Mesh technology. The framework includes (i) a geo-based topology generator that uses geographic data to produce realistic AMI cases, (ii) analytic models for the computation of packet collision probability and delay, (iii) a network simulator to recreate the behavior of large-scale RF-Mesh systems, and (iv) methods to evaluate the performance. Three different analytic models are included in the framework. The first two provide a novel analytic formulation of the packet collision probability in a mesh network with timeslotted ALOHA and the Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) protocol : the collision probability is then used to estimate the average delay in the network, and to define and evaluate performance indexes (e.g., critical nodes and survival function). In the third model, a complex Markov-Modulated System (MMS) is used to take into consideration important implementation details, such as the retransmission probability and the buffer size, that were not considered in the two previous models. This model also provides a more accurate computation of the packet collision probability. A Poisson distribution is used to represent the traffic coming from potential Smart Grid applications. The framework also includes an RFMesh network simulator, written in Java and Python. The tool provides additional enhanced features with respect to the analytic models, such as a dynamic routing protocol or different traffic distributions