Traffic scheduling for smart grid in rural areas with cognitive radios

In this paper, we study the communication architecture of smart grid for rural areas that employ cognitive radio technique. Since the communication in a cognitive radio network is normally unreliable, it is a great challenge to support applications which have stringent delay requirements, for instance, the transmission line monitoring application. To this end, we propose to reroute the data traffic with stringent delay requirement through the neighboring cells that work properly. This leads to a challenging scheduling problem, with the goal of maximizing the total throughput of the network while preserving the priority of real-time traffic in the local cell. To solve this problem, we present a scheduling algorithm that outperforms the earliest deadline scheduling and priority queue scheduling. The simulation results verify the effectiveness of our algorithm in achieving the design goals.