A Methodology to Evaluate Wireless Technologies for the Smart Grid

Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for assessing the suitability of various wireless technologies for meeting the communication requirements of Smart Grid applications. It describes an approach for translating application requirements to link traffic characteristics, determining the transmission range or coverage area of a wireless technology, and modeling the link layer to obtain performance measures such as message reliability, delay, and throughput. To illustrate the use of this approach, we analyze the performance of three representative application use cases over an IEEE 802.11 link.