Quality-of-service differentiation in single-path and multi-path routing for wireless sensor network-based smart grid applications

Electrical grid is one of the most important infrastructure of the modern nation. However, power grid has been aged over 100 years and prone to major failures. The imbalance between power demand and supply, the equipment failures and the lack of comprehensive monitoring and control capabilities are other important signs to take incremental steps for switching to a smarter power grid with effective communication, automation and monitoring skills. This new concept is named as smart grid, which is a modern power grid system with advanced communication, monitoring, sensing and control capabilities. Wireless sensor network (WSN) concept places an important role in this modernization process of the power grid with its efficient and low-cost deployment characteristics. However, harsh and complex smart grid environmental conditions, dynamic topology changes, connectivity problems, interference and fading may pose some challenges for the communication performance of WSN technology. For this objective, in this paper, the use of multi-path and single-path QoS-aware routing algorithms under harsh SG environmental conditions is investigated in order to evaluate their service differentiation capabilities in reliability and timeliness domains. In this regard, this study is an important step towards developing novel routing protocols specifically designed for smart grid environments.