On the design of wireless Smart Grid network for an apartment building based on 868 MHz low power wireless SoC

This paper presents a wireless Smart Grid network for high-rise apartment building application. In order to construct Smart Grid network for building, a cluster based wireless network where Coordinator collects electricity usage information from end-nodes of its cluster. GPRS/3G gateway is used to link each cluster to Remote center. This configuration can deploy all services of Smart Grid application, advantages of this network are simple implementation, low cost and low consumption. Several low cost and low consumption wireless sub-GHz transceivers are studied in this paper, consequently an appropriate wireless hardware is chosen and a design of Smart Grid home gateway is presented. The cluster size of network is evaluated by a good transmission performance and latency based on NS-2 (network simulation 2) tool. Following obtained results, an optimum Smart Grid network for high-rise apartment building is finally proposed.