Tuning guaranteed time slots of IEEE 802.15.4 for transformer health monitoring in the smart grid

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are anticipated to become the preferred tools of choice for monitoring and controlling power utility assets in the smart grid due to their versatility. However, in some smart grid monitoring applications, data generation rates could fluctuate rapidly due to the sudden occurrence of critical faults or failures in the monitored equipment. As a consequence, critical data could experience excessive delays because of this increase in the packet arrival rates. In this paper, we present an Adaptive Guaranteed Time Slot (GTS) allocation scheme (AGTS) for IEEE 802.15.4-based WSNs used in high traffic intensity smart grid monitoring applications. AGTS scheme can adaptively reduce the end-to-end delay and flexibly tune the GTS to provide the required Quality of Service (QoS) differentiation to delay critical smart grid monitoring applications. The proposed scheme can adaptively allocate the needed GTS to nodes transmitting high priority traffic or draw back the unneeded GTS.