Self-organization of a mesh hierarchy for smart grid monitoring in outage scenarios

Current hierarchical communication infrastructure in the smart grid is not robust for data collection from smart meters during outages. In this work, we propose a self-organizing multi-channel wireless communication framework to aid in data collection for smart grid health monitoring. Our proposed self-organization consists of two stages. First, smart meters form local mesh clusters by flattening the provisioned hierarchy. Second, the clusters interconnect to provide mesh connectivity from the outage region to functioning regions of the grid. We propose to construct this mesh-of-meshes hierarchy using a cross-layer strategy. The strategy jointly considers medium access limitations and the asymmetric traffic flow that becomes more heavy near the edges of the outage area. Our design framework allows an operator to plan network deployment, spectrum management, and medium access to perform as needed during an outage.