Design for reliable and self-sustaining neighborhood area network in smart grid

A neighborhood area network (NAN) is part of the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) in smart grid. A NAN is considered as the last-mile connection in AMI from the metering data management system (MDMS) to the customers, and is widely adopted to apply wireless technologies. In this paper, we propose a NAN design which is powered by green energy and rechargeable batteries for flexible and low-cost deployment. We study the optimal setting for the NAN to be powered by solar energy source for a given operational span. The proposed NAN is a wireless mesh network, however, it has asymmetric transmission characteristics due to the requirements of AMI. Therefore, we propose a routing protocol for uplink and downlink transmissions with local recovery capability to enhance the reliability of the proposed NAN to encounter temporary node failures.