ATR-MAC: deadline driven data collection from smartmeters in absence of aggregation

Abstract

Deployment of Smart Grid networks throughout cities introduces a realistic scenario for a large scale sensor network. Smart Meters create a wireless mesh network for receiving commands and sending metering reports back to provider company. The challenges of reliable and timely communication call for a fresh review of the well studied topic of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). We provide a centralized MAC solution for data collection, ATR-MAC, that relaxes requirements in general purpose WSNs, but emphasizes on difficulties a Smart Metering deployment will face. ATR-MAC considers variable reuse distances for minimizing propagation delay. It also increases efficiency of collection deadline instead of energy efficiency, a common concern of general-purpose WSN MAC protocols. We provide time and buffer size analysis of our algorithm, prove its correctness and show experimental results using implementation on a testbed.