Abstract
Conference Title: 2016 IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE) Conference Start Date: 2016, May 15 Conference End Date: 2016, May 18 Conference Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada In smart grids, the critical packets generated by an Electrical Device (ED) at the customer site must be communicated to a control station with minimal delay so that corrective measures, if required, can be initiated quickly at the site. This paper presents the modelling of Wireless Mesh Backbone Network (WMBN) to which customer sites are connected in a smart grid. The WMBN is comprised of Mesh Routers (MRs) that are connected wirelessly to provide an end-to-end path within the network. An analytical model is presented that takes into account Voronoi tessellation for selecting the shortest path for transmissions in this network. Each MR is equipped with a Straight-Line Path Routing (SLPR) algorithm that provides MR traversing packets with a sequence of cells to reach the identified gateway within WMBN. The long link distances between routers are subject to attenuation and communication challenges. An optimum solution to transmit critical packets with minimal delay to the identified gateway is also given. Upper and lower bounds on achievable minimal delay are derived for a Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) mode in terms of: i) signal-to-noise ratio, ii) number of channels, iii) number of hops, iv) distance, v) channel interference, and vi) interference range. Results show that in the worst-case critical packets can be delivered to their destinations in less than 4 ms, which meets the standard requirement of a smart grid.