Smart meter packet transmission via the control signal of LTE networks

The Long-Term Evolution (LTE) network has become an attractive candidate for Smart Grid (SG) communications. In spite of LTE´s growing popularity as a means of transporting SG data, it was primarily designed for high speed and high capacity mobile data traffic such as video streaming and Internet. Typically there are more than 10,000 Smart Meters (SMs) per eNode-B, bombarding it with billions of tiny fixed-size packets containing power consumption data. All SMs need to make a connection to transmit an SM packet and they need a scheduling and Resource Block (RB) request that follows the LTE standard. In this paper, we introduce SM data transmission via LTE control signaling in order to conserve resources at the eNode-B (physical channels, scheduling and RBs). With our proposed mechanism, the results show that SM packets can be sent via a control signal with no scheduling or RB usage required at the eNode-B. Simulation results show that usage of the Physical Uplink Share CHannel (PUSCH) usage is decreased 40 percentage points. Physical Downlink Share CHannel (PDSCH) and Physical Downlink Control CHannel (PDCCH) usage are reduced by 2 percentage points when compared with LTE standard.