Using a Cost Function to Choose the Best Communication Technology for Fulfilling the Smart Meters Communication Requirements

The conventional power grids are not efficient today so their ineffective functions need to be managed in a more effective way. This goal is at the base of the Smart Grid (SG) concept, to present intelligence in the energy grid. Among several SG nodes, smart meters (SMs) work in the demand side of the power grids and their number is much increasing over time. A SM is a SG device which records electric energy consumption in certain time intervals for communicating the information to the SG Control Station (CS) through the collectors and aggregators. The wireless communications have a significant role in SG functions. Hence, the spectrum scarcity due to the growing number of users is becoming a significant problem. Thus introducing an algorithm to avoid facing with spectrum scarcity by defining a Cost Function (CF) is helpful in sense of two issues. First, all SMs meet their communication requirements in the sense of delay sensitivity and data rate. The second goal is to avoid as much as possible the unnecessary allocation of the specific low delay Communication Technologies (CTs) spectrum to the SMs that are not delay sensitive. It is more preferable to support the less delay sensitive users with satellite or the CTs (with certain communication configurations such as high latency specification) and keep the low delay communication spectrum such as LTE for the users that are more delay sensitive. This paper is focused to introduce a method to achieve these goals.