A novel TD-LTE frame structure for heavy uplink traffic in smart grid

In smart grid, the communication system plays an important role in the management and control of all fields of the electrical grid. As a popular wireless broadband communication technology, the Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio access technology defined by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) provides a promising solution for communication networks used in smart grid. Since Time Division Duplexing (TDD) mode is more suitable for relatively small bandwidth and asymmetric traffic, we consider TD-LTE network deployed to fulfill the communication requirements of smart grid. However, the traditional TD-LTE network focuses on the downlink traffic design, while the smart grid network is an uplink dominated network. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel TD-LTE frame structure for heavy uplink traffic in smart grid, where uplink subframes can be flexibly configured for different traffic loads. Numerical results show that the proposed TD-LTE frame structure can increase uplink throughput dramatically. Also, the traffic delay can be reduced especially when the number of power devices is large in a cell of the smart grid network.