Quality-of-Service Differentiation for Smart Grid Neighbor Area Networks

Neighbor Area Networks (NAN) play a crucial role in the Smart Grid Communications Network (SGCN) and provide connectivity for a vast number of smart meters (SMs) while meeting the varying Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of different types of Smart Grid (SG) applications. To that effect, this paper explores the incorporation of QoS differentiation at the network layer in order to shape and control traffic of multiple classes in an end-to-end manner for the SG NAN using the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). In particular, this paper proposes QoS enabling extensions, RPL-M and RPL-M+, within the RPL framework by associating multiple network graph instances to different SG application requirements. For illustration, the paper considers two deployment scenarios: large-scale dense urban area and microgrid-based remote rural region. Simulation-centric performance evaluation, in terms of latency and throughput, is performed for periodic and critical traffic classes, for two distinct grid conditions, with increasing data traffic load. The rural region is chosen to highlight achievable performance for microgrids and the transferability of results to different grid architectures.