Performance evaluations of ZigBee in different smart grid environments

Recently, ZigBee Smart Energy profile has been developed for various smart grid applications, such as automatic metering, demand response, load control, power fraud detection, fault diagnostics, and distribution automation. In this paper, the performance of ZigBee has been evaluated in terms of network throughput, end-to-end delay, energy consumption, and packet delivery ratio in different smart grid environments, including an indoor power control room, an outdoor 500 kV substation environment, and an underground network transformer vaults. Overall, our performance evaluations show that the ZigBee is ideal to use for low-power and low-data rate smart grid applications not having very high reliability requirements and real-time deadlines.