Neighborhood-knowledge based geo-routing in PLC

Power Line Communications (PLC) is a strong candidate for providing the communication infrastructure of future smart electricity grids. While the PLC communication highways, namely electricity cables or wires, are already in place, communication between PLC devices connected to the same part of the grid is not necessarily possible due to high signal attenuation and/or interference. In this case, multihop routing is required to ensure connectivity. In this paper, we continue our previous work on multihop routing using information about the location of PLC devices, i.e., geographic routing (geo-routing) for PLC. In particular, we investigate the benefits of using knowledge about instantaneous connectivity in a local neighborhood of a device as well as power adaptation to render geo-routing fast and multihop transmission energy frugal. Simulation results demonstrate the energy saving capability of the proposed approach compared to other geo-routing algorithms from the literature, even if the cost of signaling to acquire knowledge about neighborhoods has been taken into account.