QoS Routing For Neighbor Area Network In Smart Grid

Abstract:Two-way communication network with high reliability is one of the key issues for Smart Grid (SG) to fulfill the requirement of various applications and improve the energy efficiency. Although Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) can provide high speed and cost-effect communication, there are still some challenges in reliability and quality of service (QoS) before applying to SG.In this paper, we focus on the routing protocol of Neighbor Area Network (NAN) of SG and improve the WMN routing protocol based on IEEE802.11s to meet the QoS demand of each application in SG. We first analyze some critical problems in the default routing protocol of IEEE802.11s, which is called Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP), in respect of instable routing, QoS differentiation and delay-tolerant traffic before we model the wireless mesh NAN. Then, we propose a NAN QoS improvement routing scheme called HWMP-NQ to meet the QoS demand through routing metric, link condition probing and queue optimization. To improve the reliability of HWMP-NQ, we present a backup multi-gateway routing scheme along with a routing reliability correction factor to mitigate the effect of routing fluctuation and a one-hop PERR route maintenance scheme to reduce the routing overhead and improve the reliability at the same time.To evaluate our proposal, we implement it on ns3and set up NAN topology along with SG application flows. Simulation results show that HWMP-NQ can effectively differentiate and satisfy the QoS requirement of various applications in SG. Meanwhile, the average packet delivery ratio and throughput are well improved while routing overhead is reduced with the failure rate of wireless mesh points is introduced, which means that it enables the wireless mesh NAN to handle more service flows with higher reliability.