Design and analysis of Split- and Aggregated-transport control protocol (SA-TCP) for Smart Metering Infrastructure

Abstract

This paper investigates the TCP's congestion control mechanism effectiveness for smart meters. We show that the classic congestion control causes a high loss rate for metered data and disrupts competing traffic flows in a shared network. The paper introduces the performance analysis of our proposed Splitand Aggregated-TCP (SA-TCP). SA-TCP complies with industrial bodies' directions (e.g., by Hydro One Networks Inc., Canada) in terms of the architecture, specifically the deployment of hardware devices called Regional Collectors (RC). We argue that RCs can function as transport layer aggregation devices rather than routing devices. This modification reduces packet loss rate and improves throughput for Smart Metering Infrastructure (SMI) traffic. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of the smart metering communication network running SA-TCP in terms of throughput, loss rate and latency. Our analysis is validated by extensive NS-2 simulation.