A Cost Function Based Prioritization Method for Smart Grid Communication Network

In Smart Grids (SG) scenarios, the different nodes composing the system have to communicate to the Control Stations several type of information with different requirements. There are many communication technologies (CTs), with different Quality of Service characteristics, able to support the SG communication requirements. By focusing on wireless communications, it is possible to notice that spectrum is becoming a rare source due to its exponential increasing demand. Thus, resource allocation to support different types of SG nodes should be performed in order to maximize the resource efficiency and respect the SG requirements. Defining a cost function (CF) helps to accomplish this goal. To this aim, it is also needed to prioritize the different SG nodes based on their goals. By using the SG nodes prioritization and the CF, a priority table is defined in which the nodes and the CTs are put in order, based on their weights. The numerical results show that the proposed method allows selecting the best CT for each type of SG nodes.