Multi Channel Allocation and Congestion Control for Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Networks

The evolution of traditional electricity distribution infrastructures towards Smart Grid networks has generated the need to carry out new research. There are many fields that have attracted the attention of researchers, among which is the improvement of the performance of the so-called Neighborhood Area Networks (NAN). In this paper, three mechanisms for these kind of networks are proposed, implemented and evaluated: traffic differentiation, multichannel allocation and congestion control. These proposals have been evaluated in the context of a wireless mesh networks (WMN) made up by a set of smart meter devices, where various smart grids (SG) applications are sending their data traffics. Each SG application must meet its unique quality of service (QoS) requirements, such as reliability and delay. To evaluate the proposals, we have built some NAN scenarios by using the ns-3 simulator and its 802.11s basic model, which we have modified to implement our techniques. Compared with the basic Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP), our modifications, multiple channel (M-HWMP) and congestion control (MC-HWMP), show improvements in terms of packet delivery ratio and transit time.