LAA LTE and WiFi based Smart Grid Metering Infrastructure in 3.5 GHz Band

TL;DR

This paper proposes a coexistence architecture using LTE-U and WiFi in the 3.5 GHz band for smart grid metering, demonstrating effective coexistence and potential for advanced AMI deployment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fixed duty cycled LTE-U and WiFi architecture for smart grid AMI in the 3.5 GHz band, analyzing coexistence performance through system-level simulations.

Findings

Good coexistence between LTE and WiFi in 3.5 GHz band

Effective data transfer for smart meters using LTE and WiFi

Potential for deploying smart grid infrastructure in shared spectrum

Abstract

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) of smart grid requires bidirectional communication for transferring data to billing center, for which WiFi is an attractive choice. However, WiFi operates in the unlicensed bands and LTE needs to offload data in the same unlicensed band. Recent release of 3.5 GHz (also termed as citizen broadband radio service (CBRS)) can be an attractive shared band where LTE and WiFi can coexist. In our study, we propose a fixed duty cycled LTE-U and WiFi based smart grid metering infrastructure where smart meter uses WiFi and data collector (termed as Access Point (AP)) of smart meters uses LTE for transferring data. We investigate the coexistence performance of LTE-WiFi in the 3.5 GHz band using a time division duplexing (TDD) LTE confederated by WiFi along with FTP traffic model for system level simulation. The simulation results demonstrate a good neighboring coexistence between LTE and WiFi resulting a candidate AMI architecture for smart grid in the 3.5 GHz band.