Impact of the weak link count mechanism on G3-PLC LOADng routing protocol

G3-PLC has been defined for Smart Grid. The electrical grid is considered as a dynamic network because its performance are time-dependant. It is the reason why G3-PLC standard choose adapted technologies to perform communication is such harsh conditions. One of them concerns the packets routing. Data transmission needs to be performed hop-by-hop by using nodes as relays. LOADng routing protocol, initially developed for Wireless Sensor Networks, was chosen but some mechanisms were added to increase its performance on PLC networks. These mechanisms are described in this paper and the weak link count mechanism is specifically studied. This mechanism privileges the best quality routes in place of the shortest routes in the network. The performance of the routing is then analysed by implementing the LOADng protocol on the network simulator Contiki/Cooja. In particular, we evaluate the impact of the frame error rate, the weak link rate and the average number of neighbours on the weak link count mechanism. Thanks to simulations, we determine in which cases this added mechanism improves the performance of G3-PLC LOADng.