Improving the Reliability of Optimised Link State Routing Protocol in
      Smart Grid’s Neighbour Area Network
Creators: name: Tsado, Yakubu
Publisher: name: Publisher unspecified
Year: 2017

description: A reliable and resilient communication infrastructure that can cope with
      variable application traffic types and delay objectives is one of the
      prerequisites that differentiates a Smart Grid from the conventional
      electrical grid. However, the legacy communication infrastructure in the
      existing electrical grid is insufficient, if not incapable of satisfying
      the diverse communication requirements of the Smart Grid. The IEEE 802.11
      ad hoc Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is re-emerging as one of the
      communication networks that can significantly extend the reach of Smart
      Grid to backend devices through the Advanced Metering Infrastructure
      (AMI). However, the unique characteristics of AMI application traffic in
      the Smart Grid poses some interesting challenges to conventional
      communication networks including the ad hoc WMN. Hence, there is a need to
      modify the conventional ad hoc WMN, to address the uncertainties that may
      exist in its applicability in a Smart Grid environment.
      
      This research carries out an in-depth study of the communication of Smart
      Grid application traffic types over ad hoc WMN deployed in the Neighbour
      Area Network (NAN). It begins by conducting a critical review of the
      application characteristics and traffic requirements of several Smart Grid
      applications and highlighting some key challenges. Based on the reviews,
      and assuming that the application traffic types use the internet protocol
      (IP) as a transport protocol, a number of Smart Grid application traffic
      profiles were developed. Through experimental and simulation studies, a
      performance evaluation of an ad hoc WMN using the Optimised Link State
      Routing (OLSR) routing protocol was carried out. This highlighted some
      capacity and reliability issues that routing AMI application traffic may
      face within a conventional ad hoc WMN in a Smart Grid NAN.
      
      Given the fact that conventional routing solutions do not consider the
      traffic requirements when making routing decisions, another key
      observation is the inability of link metrics in routing protocols to
      select good quality links across multiple hops to a destination and also
      provide Quality of Service (QoS) support for target application traffic.
      As with most routing protocols, OLSR protocol uses a single routing metric
      acquired at the network layer, which may not be able to accommodate
      different QoS requirements for application traffic in Smart Grid. To
      address these problems, a novel multiple link metrics approach to improve
      the reliability performance of routing in ad hoc WMN when deployed for
      Smart Grid is presented. It is based on the OLSR protocol and explores the
      possibility of applying QoS routing for application traffic types in NAN
      based ad hoc WMN. Though routing in multiple metrics has been identified
      as a complex problem, Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques
      such as the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and pruning have been used
      to perform such routing on wired and wireless multimedia applications. 
      
      The proposed multiple metrics OLSR with AHP is used to offer the best
      available route, based on a number of considered metric parameters. To
      accommodate the variable application traffic requirements, a study that
      allows application traffic to use the most appropriate routing metric is
      presented. The multiple metrics development is then evaluated in Network
      Simulator 2.34; the simulation results demonstrate that it outperforms
      existing routing methods that are based on single metrics in OLSR. It also
      shows that it can be used to improve the reliability of application
      traffic types, thereby overcoming some weaknesses of existing single
      metric routing across multiple hops in NAN. The IEEE 802.11g was used to
      compare and analyse the performance of OLSR and the IEEE 802.11b was used
      to implement the multiple metrics framework which demonstrate a better
      performance than the single metric. However, the multiple metrics can also
      be applied for routing on different IEEE wireless standards, as well as
      other communication technologies such as Power Line Communication (PLC)
      when deployed in Smart Grid NAN.