Analytic model and simulation study for network scalability in smart utility networks

The rapid deployment of smart meters across North America to measure consumption of utility resources such as water, gas and electricity has presented a problem of scale. The huge amount of data thus collected is being used to make demand-response applications smarter as a part of the Smart Grid initiative. The wireless mesh architecture is a popular deployment method for smart utility networks and Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), due to the low deployment costs offered by this method. Severe limitations are imposed on the scale of deployment by wireless environment parameters such as fading and path loss, differing widely from home and outdoor to industrial and in-building scenarios. Reliability in such networks is strongly affected by deployment scale and vice-versa. In this paper, we propose an analytic model for smart utility network scale as a function of link reliability and aim to deduce a relationship between network size and average link packet success probability for scales of deployment. We verify this result by simulating a routing protocol in large scale deployments and comparing with results from analytic model.