A novel scheduling technique for Smart Grid data on LTE networks

Smart Grid (SG) is envisioned as the future of the electricity delivery system, which can be intelligently monitored, and operated via communication links. The Smart Meter (SM), one of the key elements of the SG, identifies power consumption and communicates with the control center. The long term evolution (LTE) network has become an attractive candidate for SG communications. Regardless of LTE´s growing popularity as a means for transporting SG data, it is mainly designed for high speed and high capacity data traffic such as video streaming and internet traffic. Because of the different set of Quality-of-Service (QoS) considered for those applications compared to those required for the SG traffic, LTE is unable to guarantee the delivery of SG data with required QoS levels. As a result, existing scheduling mechanisms may not be able to efficiently handle SM traffic at a heavily loaded eNode-B. Especially, there may not be sufficient resource blocks (RBs) available at an eNode-B for SM traffic. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel scheduling technique for prioritizing SM data for an LTE eNode-B. Further, two RBs are reserved for SG data and each SM is polled periodically by the proposed method. Results indicate that since a guaranteed connectivity could be provided to all SMs, the latency related to SG data is reduced.