A hybrid wireless system for power line monitoring

Smart Grid is an attractive topic in recent years, especially for those developing countries, such as China, who has large population and less energy resources. An extensive communication system is the essential infrastructure of the Smart Grid to ensure information exchange and resource management rapidly and efficiently. Since it will affect all areas of power grid, from generation system to transmission and distribution system, the communication system will be hybrid and involve various communication technologies, such as optical transmission, wireless techniques, advanced sensor networks, etc. In this paper, we focus the discussion on the broadband wireless access techniques used for monitoring power transmission line. We propose a hybrid wireless system based on WiFi and WiMAX to complete the dual directional communications for data collection and system controlling. The deployment capacity is analyzed and the challenges for spectrum utilization are discussed. Simulation results indicate that the system we designed can match the performance requirements when sharing spectrum with others.