Performance Evaluation of Wireless Mesh Network Routing Protocols for Smart Grid AMI Networks Yakubu Tsado and Kelum Gamage Department of Engineering Lancaster University Lancaster, UK y.tsado1@lancaster.ac.uk k.gamage@lancaster.ac.uk David Lund HW Communications Ltd Lancaster, UK d.lund@hwcomm.ac.uk Abstract— Recent Advances in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) makes it one of the candidate communication technologies for Smart Grid Automatic Metering Infrastructure (AMI) because of its scalability and low cost of deployment. However, its capacity and multi-hoping performance in dynamic environment may not guarantee resilience and packet delivery reliability requirements of AMI. Theoretical and practical studies have shown that the multi-hoping capacity of a mesh network is constrained by increase in the number of nodes and number of hops in the network. In addition traffic requirements for smart meters will further compound WMN multi-hopping issues. In this paper, the performance of WMN when deployed for AMI is carried out using two wireless routing protocols; Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) and Optimised Link State Rout protocol (OLSR) in NS-3. Simulation results show that compared to the reliability requirement of AMI, there is need for improving the routing metric for both protocols. Furthermore, The Dynamic Link Exchange Protocol (DLEP) which allows layer 2 link estimation was proposed to enhance the route decision. Keywords—HWMP, OLSR; AMI; DLEP; Grid network Topology. I. INTRODUCTION Power monitoring and control system applications have long been in existence in the electrical grid system in a small scale and it was particularly for monitoring and managing the voltage levels and different components at the power distribution and generation level. Moving forward, the new and advanced power grid known as Smart Grid (SG) will extend monitoring and control on the electrical grid system by allowing a bi-directional flow of information and flow of electric power across different levels and devices in the electrical grid network. The expected outcome of this renovation is to improve load estimation, facilitate renewable power generation and allow consumer energy management capabilities. Support for data exchange for controlling power distribution, generation and consumption in smart grid does not only involve deploying existing wired and wireless communication systems in the power grid but also necessitates the improvement and development of communication systems to suit the stringent requirements for SG function. Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) was developed to guarantee connectivity by building a multi-hop wireless backbone to interconnect and extend backhaul access to isolated areas. It has become one of the candidate communication networks touted to be used as the main network or redundant network for data collection, management and control in Smart Grid [1]. Data collection applications such as Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) will require the Utility companies to receive and respond to information on real time usage or pre- defined time schedules from the consumer side via smart meters [2]. AMI information have stringent requirements such that the reliability of information are required to be over 99 % [14]-[15]. Studies has revealed WMN has the potential to support ubiquitous and high speed broadband access to both urban and rural areas [3] as a result of its scalability, easy maintenance and low cost of deployment especially in the rural areas [4]. In order to validate the performance of WMN in urban and rural areas, an evaluation of proactive and reactive routing protocols in WMN was investigated in [3] to re-affirm its support for traffic exchange in both rural areas and urban areas. Nevertheless, the investigation did not consider a WMN for SG AMI with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. For example deploying WMN for smart metering will require multiple nodes to send different traffic types to a data collector which may affect packet delivery reliability, throughput and delay as a result of the following reasons [9]:  Throughput for each node/meter transmitting to the data collector is limited by the channel capacity and the forwarding loads imposed by other nodes/meters.  Shared resources in wireless network lead to serious contention problems as only one node can allow access of the wireless medium per time.  Poor routing or path decisions as a result of routing metric being used by the routing protocol. A lot of effort has been expended on IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols to exploit physical layer techniques. However, in multi-hop WMN, performance also depends on the ability of the routing protocols to choose routes depending on the current network conditions. Route estimation in existing WMN are achieved through layer 3 and layer 2 properties of the network. Aside recent development in IEEE 802.11s which defines multi-hop forwarding at the link layer,