Abstract
Smart meters are being deployed worldwide on a trial basis and are expected to enable remote reading and demand response among other advanced functions, by establishing a two-way communication network. However, it remains to be determined as to how these meters would transmit their data to an aggregation point. Our paper employs a medium access control (MAC) protocol for a cooperative network to address this problem. The said protocol has been developed on the GNU Radio platform, while the test-bed consists of universal software radio peripherals (USRPs) that serve as network nodes. The performance of the system has then been evaluated and compared with that of fully cooperative and single-input-single-output (SISO) networks. It has been shown that the proposed system outperforms the SISO network in terms packet error rates and throughput.