Node Allocation Strategy for Low Latency Neighborhood Area Networks in Smart Grid

Neighborhood area networks (NANs) lay the foundation for robust communication in smart grids to support stable and secure end-user connectivity with substations. Firstly, the current solutions are unrealistic to meet the time-bound requirements for smart grid applications with large number of intermediate node connectivity in NANs. Secondly, the existing Low-power Wireless Personal Area Network (LoWPAN) does not scale up to a thousand nodes while meeting the latency requirement of delay-critical smart grid applications. To address both the scaling and latency issues, this paper proposes the use of long-range communication, such as 5G, to complement short-range communication in NANs that effectively create a two-layer, primary and secondary networks. We identified the need for a Node Allocation Strategy (NAS) to reduce the latency for scaling NANs. NAS, particularly, is designed for NANs with thousands of smart meter nodes located at secondary networks. We model the NAS to reduce the hop count between smart meters and the utility center through an algorithm designed and proposed in this paper. The proposed NAS communication strategy for NANs applied to various dense and sparsely populated real smart grid scenarios to examine the efficacy of this approach.