QoS Routing in Smart Grid

TL;DR

This paper proposes a QoS routing mechanism for smart grid communication networks, deriving QoS requirements from load dynamics and optimizing routing to enhance stability and revenue.

Contribution

It introduces a novel QoS derivation method based on load-price dynamics and a greedy routing algorithm with proven approximation guarantees.

Findings

The proposed QoS mechanism effectively secures communication quality in smart grids.

The greedy routing algorithm achieves a $K$-approximation of optimal performance.

Numerical simulations confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

Smart grid is an emerging technology which is able to control the power load via price signaling. The communication between the power supplier and power customers is a key issue in smart grid. Performance degradation like delay or outage may cause significant impact on the stability of the pricing based control and thus the reward of smart grid. Therefore, a QoS mechanism is proposed for the communication system in smart grid, which incorporates the derivation of QoS requirement and applies QoS routing in the communication network. For deriving the QoS requirement, the dynamics of power load and the load-price mapping are studied. The corresponding impacts of different QoS metrics like delay are analyzed. Then, the QoS is derived via an optimization problem that maximizes the total revenue. Based on the derived QoS requirement, a simple greedy QoS routing algorithm is proposed for the requirement of high speed routing in smart grid. It is also proven that the proposed greedy algorithm is a $K$-approximation. Numerical simulation shows that the proposed mechanism and algorithm can effectively derive and secure the communication QoS in smart grid.