Simulation-Based Performance Analysis Of Wireless Routing Protocols For Smart Metering Applications

Abstract

There is a growing interest for smart metering applications in wireless environment recently. Wireless smart meter devices are easy to use solutions for recording energy consumption and report back the amount to the utility on a daily basis. This kind of usage of smart meter devices can be considered as a special subset of wireless sensor networks (WSN). The communication protocol used in smart meter networks has to be fast, reliable and secure. The challenge in developing such a protocol is the difficulty to debug software on multiple wireless nodes at the same time. This difficulty highlights the importance of the simulation-based approach. The most laborious part of the wireless communication is the routing protocol in the network layer when it comes to implementation. In this paper different wireless communication routing protocols are compared by simulation including naive Flooding, Gradient-Based Routing (GBR) and Directed Diffusion (DD). The simulation results show that GBR and DD have a superior performance over flooding as expected, and that GBR and DD has similar efficiency in a smart metering application. Since GBR is easier to implement it is the recommended solution for routing in a smart metering network.