Evaluation of RPL for medium voltage power line communication

The advantages of using power line communication (PLC) to make grids more intelligent and provide new applications are obvious: in order to distribute electricity there are power lines to all buildings and facilities, no additional cables have to be deployed and no wireless transmission power or other regulations have to be observed. However, there are currently no large communication networks using medium voltage power line communication. In this paper we evaluate the performance of the IPv6 routing protocol RPL designed for networks with low-power devices and lossy links on PLC links in a medium voltage scenario. For this purpose the embedded OS Contiki networking stack has been extended on the MAC and networking layer. To capture realistic conditions, we implemented a SINR (signal-to-noise+interference-ratio) model of the MV PLC channel for the COOJA network simulator. This enables us to investigate latency, success rate, control traffic for a partly meshed medium voltage grid simulation scenario based on the grid layout of a local utility. Thus we provide a benchmark to evaluate networking protocols for monitoring and control applications for smart grids. Based on the evaluation results, we can identify application scenarios where RPL is suitable as well as some of the systems's constraints and drawbacks.