Priority-Based Dynamic Spectrum Management in a Smart Grid Network Environment

The heterogeneous smart grid (SG) poses two major challenges for wireless networks, namely, providing sufficient bandwidth for a wide variety of applications and high reliability for critical real-time applications. To address these challenges, the impact of communication outage on the demand response management as a typical SG application is analyzed in this paper. A dynamic spectrum management (DSM) technique is proposed to allocate resources, considering the QoS and application priorities. Vacant digital TV frequency bands are utilized to support SG applications. An algorithm to estimate the SG capacity is introduced, which can be applied to various user distributions and SG environments. This is used in conjunction with a low-complexity coloring theory algorithm to allocate the spectrum. The results presented show that DSM provides better performance than traditional fixed spectrum management, in terms of QoS and secondary spectrum utilization.