Vehicle-assisted data delivery for smart grid: An optimal stopping approach

The booming smart grid produces a large amount of data that should be transmitted to the utility control center (UCC), typically by means of the cellular network. This may pose a prohibitive transmission cost and choke the cellular network. As an effort to address this issue, we propose a vehicle assisted data delivery method to offload the cellular network, in which vehicles are utilized to carry and deliver the data from distributed locations to the UCC through the deployed roadside units. Two data forwarding schemes are developed based on the theory of optimal stopping rules to increase the data delivery probability. Simulation results are given to demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve high data delivery ratio through the roadside network so that it can efficiently offload the cellular network and reduce the communication cost.