A wireless sensor network for monitoring smart grid transmission lines

Smart grid is a modernized power grid that uses information and communication technology to gather and act on information, to use the information to provide automatic control to improve the efficiency, reliability and sustainability of the grid. In this paper, we study a wireless sensor network for monitoring long range power transmission line in smart grid. The energy efficiency is the major concern in this paper since the monitoring network is powered by renewable energy. Taking delay in consideration, we first get the optimal energy efficiency. To provide better quality-of-service (QoS) of the sensor network, we propose schemes for weighted average energy efficiency and average delay. Then, we propose a sequential control scheme, which achieves higher weighted average energy efficiency by increasing signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio. Moreover, with the combination of transmitting power, sequential control and delay, we conduct numerical study to demonstrate that the proposed sequential control is a practical method in improving weighted average energy efficiency. We also study the practical application of the sequential control when delay is taken into consideration since monitoring data in smart grid is delay-sensitive.