Aggregation Points Planning in Smart Grid Communication System

Aggregation Point (AP) in neighborhood area network (NAN) plays a key role on smart grid communication. The AP stores and forwards data stream between home area network (HAN) and wide area network (WAN) in the smart grid. In this letter, we study how to plan the APs in the smart grid to minimize the total deployment cost of the opening APs and the connecting cost between the APs and the HANs while considering the capacity of the APs and the traffic demands of the HANs. Our general formulation leads to an NP-hard problem and an approximation algorithm is developed to address it. Numerical results show that our proposed algorithm has great advantages over other heuristic methods. Furthermore, our proposal gives a performance-guaranteed planning scheme of the APs for smart grid communication.