RPL Routing Protocol Performance in Smart Grid Applications Based Wireless Sensors: Experimental and Simulated Analysis

The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the Smart Grid (SG) applications that used to upgrade the current power system by proposing a two-way communication system to connect the smart meter devices at homes with the electric control company. The design and deployment of an efficient routing protocol solution for AMI systems are considered to be a critical challenge due to the constrained resources of the smart meter nodes. IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) was recently standardized by the IETF and originally designed to satisfy the routing requirements of lossy and low power networks like wireless sensors (WSN). We have two kinds of AMI applications, on one hand AMI based WSN and on the other hand AMI based PLC communication. In this paper, we proposed a real and simulated implementation of RPL behavior with proper modifications to support the AMI based WSN routing requirements. We evaluate RPL performance using 140 nodes from the wireless sensor testbed (IoT-LAB) and 1000 nodes using Cooja simulator measure RPL performance within medium and high-density networks. We adopted two routing metrics for path selection: First one is HOP Count (HC) and the second is Expected Transmission Unit (ETX) to evaluate RPL performance in terms of packet delivery ratio; network latency; control traffic overhead; and power consumption. Our results illustrate that routes with ETX calculations in low and medium network densities outperform routes using HC and the performance decreases as the network becomes dense. However, Cooja implementation results provides an average reasonable performance for AMI with high-density networks; still many RPL nodes suffering from high packet loss rates, network congestion and many retransmissions due to the selection of optimal paths with highly unreliable links

Shared Sensor Networks Fundamentals, Challenges, Opportunities, Virtualization Techniques, Comparative Analysis, Novel Architecture and Taxonomy

The rabid growth of today’s technological world has led us to connecting every electronic device worldwide together, which guides us towards the Internet of Things (IoT). Gathering the produced information based on a very tiny sensing devices under the umbrella of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The nature of these networks suffers from missing sharing among them in both hardware and software, which causes redundancy and more budget to be used. Thus, the appearance of Shared Sensor Networks (SSNs) provides a real modern revolution in it. Where it targets making a real change in its nature from domain specific networks to concurrent running domain networks. That happens by merging it with the technology of virtualization that enables the sharing feature over different levels of its hardware and software to provide the optimal utilization of the deployed infrastructure with a reduced cost. This article is concerned with surveying the idea of SSNs, the difference between it and the traditional WSNs, the requirements for its construction, challenges facing it, and the opportunities that are provided by it, then describing our proposed architectures. As a result of using virtualization technology as a basic block in building SSNs, using different types of virtualization will produce different types of SSNs that will give different usages to it. This article proposes a novel approach of taxonomy for SSNs that is based on the used virtualization techniques, and it describes the needs and usages of each one. It presents a wide array of previously proposed solutions comparing them to each other and a brief description of the issues addressed by each category of that taxonomy. Additionally, the shared sensor architecture and shared network architecture were depicted. Finally, some of its applications in some daily life fields are listed