0090-6778 (c) 2018 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information. This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TCOMM.2018.2835453, IEEE Transactions on Communications 1 Reliability Enhancement of Smart Metering System Using Millimeter Wave Technology Wael Fatnassi, Student Member, IEEE, and Zouheir Rezki, Senior Member, IEEE Abstract—Millimeter wave (mmWave) technology has been advocated as a promising infrastructure to provide reliable communications, both in indoor and outdoor environments. In this paper, we extend the application of mmWave to the uplink communication between smart meters (SMs) and a gateway. Such a communication is subject to interference from SMs belonging to adjacent networks and blockage caused by human bodies. Using a three-dimension (3D) stochastic blockage model, we derive the outage probability. When human-body blockage is neglected, the high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) analysis shows a diversity gain of (mLM), where mL is the Nakagami-fading parameter of the line of sight (LOS) of the reference transmitter’s channel and M is the number of receive antennas at the gateway. Accounting for human-body blockage, the diversity gain reduces to (mN M) where mN is the Nakagami-fading parameter of the non line of sight (NLOS) of the reference transmitter’s channel. Our analysis shows that the probability that an SM is in LOS decays exponentially with the link length and the density of blockages. Although at high SNR blockage reduces the diversity gain, our numerical results show that blockage may decrease the outage probability at finite SNR. Keywords—MmWave propagation channel, indoor radio channel, Nakagami fading, shadowing, Poisson point process. I. I NTRODUCTION A. Motivation and Background Smart Grid (SG) is considered as an intelligent network for delivering electrical power systems [1]. It combines the transmission of electricity and information in order to improve the quality of electricity transmission [2]. It includes a variety of operational and energy measures including smart meters (SMs). Generally, smart metering system (SMS) consists of metering and communication infrastructures [3]. The com- munication infrastructures of the SG may include wireline technologies such as power line communication (PLC) or wireless communications. However, the PLC faces many tech- nical challenges like the unexpected propagation characteristics of transmission and distribution lines, strong electromagnetic interference and higher signal losses [3]. Hence, wireless communication has been incorporated in the SG as it brings several advantages in terms of installation, coverage, and high flexibility. Standards such as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax), Universal Mobile Telecommunications Sys- tem (UMTS), Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Com- puter Engineering, University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, USA. Emails: {wfatnassi,zrezki}@uidaho.edu. Part of this paper will be presented at the 2018 international conference on communications, workshops (2018 ICC- Workshops) Kansas, USA, May 20, 2018. (LTE-A) have been already used for SG communications, in outdoor environments. Likewise, standards such as IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15 based Wi-Fi, and Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) have been used for indoor environments. Also, several industrial standards are based on IEEE 802.15.4 in order to perform monitoring and control applications. One of the most widely adopted standard in this class is ZigBee due to its extended network capabilities [4]. However, despite its numerous advantages, wireless com- munications in the SG suffer from many challenges such as limited bandwidth and sensitivity to interference [5]. In that sense, the transmission at mmWave frequencies seems to be a promising alternative for SG due to its immunity against interference and its free wideband spectrum [6]. In addition, the management of SG power resources have the following re- quirements: Real-time processing of data, and lower transmis- sion latencies with reliable communication over the network [7]. Evidently, mmWave technology meets these requirements as one of the available technology options for reliable, secure, and cost effective operation of SG [7]. MmWave is an element of 5G technology, and in [8], the authors showed how 5G mobile cellular network provides an adequate environment for monitoring and control tasks in smart grid. In other words, they showed that smart grids need a wide area monitoring system (WAMS) to detect and counteract power grids disturbances in real time, thus requiring a communication infrastructure able to: • Integrate measurement devices like smart meters (SMs) with extreme communication reliability and ultra-low (millisecond) latency. • Provide support for distributed and real-time computa- tion architecture to provide an estimate of the system state variables, i.e., voltage, and current magnitude. In [9], two scenarios have been compared: an LTE-based centralized network management approach and a 5G-based distributed network management approach in the smart grid. The 5G-based distributed network shows a significant improve- ment over LTE-based distributed network in the performance of the network management by reducing the latencies which is beneficial for the monitoring and control of the smart grid [9]. To summarize, mmWave meets two essential requirements of the SMS: • Real time-processing of the data and lower transmission latencies. • High-reliable communication over the network. Note that, since the usual data rate requirement in SMS is around 300-500 kbps [10], communications over mmWave frequencies is implemented for SMSs only for its desirable