A Grouped System Architecture for Smart Grids Based AMI Communications Over LTE

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hierarchical grouping and scheduling architecture for smart meter communications over LTE, improving overload handling and ensuring reliable energy monitoring in dense urban smart grid deployments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel grouped architecture and scheduling method for smart meters over LTE, addressing overload issues and enhancing urban smart grid communication efficiency.

Findings

LTE with grouping and scheduling outperforms traditional methods.

The architecture ensures full monitoring and control in high-density areas.

Proposed solution effectively manages overload in AMI traffic.

Abstract

A smart grid based Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), is a technology that enables the utilities to monitor and control the electricity consumption through a set of various smart meters (SMs) connected via a two way communication infrastructure. One of the key challenges for smart grids is how to connect a large number of devices. On the other hand, 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE), the latest standard for mobile communications, was developed to provide stable service performance and higher data rates for a large number of mobile users. Therefore, LTE is considered a promising solution for wide area connectivity for SMs. In this paper, a grouped hierarchal architecture for SMs communications over LTE is introduced. Then, an efficient grouped scheduling technique is proposed for SMs transmissions over LTE. The proposed architecture efficiently solves the overload problem due to AMI traffic and guarantees a full monitoring and control for energy consumption. The results of our suggested solution showed that LTE can serve better for smart grids based AMI with particular grouping and scheduling scheme. In addition, the presented technique can able to be used in urban areas having high density of SMs.