Assessment of LTE Wireless Access for Monitoring of Energy Distribution in the Smart Grid

作者：Madueno German C^*; Nielsen Jimmy J^*; Kim Dong Min^*; Pratas Nuno K^*; Stefanovic Cedomir^*; Popovski Petar^*

来源：IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2016, 34(3): 675-688.

DOI：10.1109/JSAC.2016.2525639

• LTE
• access reservation model
• signaling impact
• smart grid monitoring
• smart meter

While LTE has been widely rolled out for human-type services, it is also a promising solution for cost-efficient connectivity of the smart gridmonitoring equipment. This is a type of machine-to-machine (M2M) traffic that consists mainly of sporadic uplink transmissions. In such a setting, the amount of traffic that can be served in a cell is not constrained by the data capacity, but rather by the signaling constraints in the random access channel and control channel. In this paper, we explore these limitations using a detailed simulation of the LTE access reservation protocol (ARP). We find that 1) assigning more random access opportunities may actually worsen performance and 2) the additional signaling that follows the ARP has very large impact on the capacity in terms of the number of supported devices; we observed a reduction in the capacity by almost a factor of 3. This suggests that a lightweight access method, with a reduced number of signaling messages, needs to be considered in standardization for M2M applications. Additionally we propose a tractable analytical model to calculate the outage that can be rapidly implemented and evaluated. The model accounts for the features of the random access, control channel, and uplink and downlink data channels, as well as retransmissions.

• 出版日期2016-3