Performance analysis of WiMAX polling service for smart grid meter reading applications

With the increasing demand of electrical energy in the near future it is necessary to develop an efficient load demand management system for the electricity grids. To implement such a load demand management system recently, the smart grid architecture has been proposed. Future electricity grids can be converted to a smart grid by overlaying a hierarchical communication network on the electricity distribution system which will allow real-time information exchange between different operational entities in a grid. This paper presents a wireless network architecture based on the physical and MAC layers of the WiMAX standard serving smart meters and different metering applications in the smart grid. Through extensive simulations using OPNET simulation models we analyze cell size, terrain models, channel capacity, packet losses, transmission power, Interpolling time -IPT- and transport protocols to outline an optimal network configuration to fulfill the communication needs of the smart grid applications.