A Study on the Efficient Wireless Sensor Networks

for Operation Monitoring and Control in Smart Grid

Applications
Md Monirojjaman Monshi, Osama A. Mohammed
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Florida International University
Email: mmons021@fiu.edu, mohammed@fiu.edu
Abstract Low cost and collaborative nature of wireless sensor
network makes it promising reliable, secure and self-healing twoway communication for monitoring and controlling of the
equipment in the smart grid. But for time critical applications
like grid fault isolation and recovery, demand response, wide
area situational awareness demand low latency enabled faster
communication network infrastructure. The grid can be really
smart enough when we can control the grid in real time without
any potential blackout. To meet this challenge this paper
evaluates the performance of IEEE standard 802.15.4 wireless
sensor networks with varying network sizes. NS2 (Network
Simulator 2) has been employed to evaluate the performance of
the wireless sensor networks using various ad-hoc routing
protocols. The paper then analyzes the results and finally reaches
to a conclusion about the potential areas where wireless sensor
network can be deployed for efficient operation monitoring and
control of the smart grid.
Keywords Smart grid, Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs), Adhoc routing protocols, latency, packet delivery ratio, IEEE 802.15.4

I. INTRODUCTION
Installing large wired communication system for monitoring
the power grid costs time and money. Because it is required to
set up additional equipments and cables in already cluttered
power grid facilities. Moreover, whenever any fault occurs in
the system, communication becomes difficult, sometimes even
impossible. Only wireless sensor network can ease this
problem for the grid. Low cost wireless sensor has paved the
way for grid automation, real time monitoring and remote
control of system elements such as primary and secondary sub
stations, power lines, capacitor banks, feeder switches, fault
indications and other physical facilities. Wireless Sensor
Networks (WSNs) with its affordable low cost and numerous
features enable utilities to monitor its remote facilities any
time with applications such as SCADA.
According to the recent Annual Energy Outlook report of
the U.S. Energy Information Administration, residential
electricity demand is forecasted to increase by 24% within the
following several decades [1], while the global electricity
consumption trend is also reported to be increasing
continuously [2]. The negative impacts of rising consumption
are becoming more evident with the diminishing fossil fuels
and accumulating greenhouse gases. Moreover, the mismatch
between demand and supply and lack of automation and
monitoring tools have already caused major blackouts

978-1-4799-0053-4/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

worldwide. Apparently, the traditional power grid has shown

signs of inefficient operation and has been experiencing
difficulties in meeting the requirements of the 21st century. As
a result, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007
gave a start for the smart grid implementation in the United
States. U.S. Department of Energy proposed the requirements
on the smart grid communication which essentially needs to
be two-way flow of electricity with the two-way flow of
information to revolutionize electricity generation and
delivery [3].
The need for having smart grid smart communication
infrastructure is insufficient for precise operation, monitoring
and control. In addition to the overstressed situation, the
existing power grid also suffers from the lack of pervasive and
effective communications, monitoring, fault diagnostics, and
automation, which further increase the possibility of regionwide system breakdown due to the cascading effect initiated
by a single fault [4].Specially latency is a great issue for fault
monitoring and control of the grid to avoid potential black out
from cascading effect. Cascading effect can be avoided if the
fault can be identified in real time. But the existing
communication infrastructure with high delay hinders the realtime control of the grid. Latency requirement of the network
for smart grid is shown in the Table I below [3].
TABLE I
SMART GRID FUNCTIONALITIES AND COMMUNICATIONS NEEDS
Application
Bandwidth
Latency
10-100 kbps/node,
500 kbps for
backhaul
14kbps- 100 kbps
per node/device
600-1500 kbps

2-15 sec

Distribution Energy
Resources and
Storage
Electric
Transportation

9.6-56 kbps

20 ms-15 sec

9.6-56 kbps, 100

kbps is a good target

2 sec-5 min

Distribution Grid
Management

9.6-100 kbps

100 ms-2 sec

AMI
Demand Response
Wide Area Situational
Awareness

500 ms - several
minutes
20 ms-200 ms

In this paper, we focus on simulation of an ad-hoc wireless

network to evaluate the performance and latency of the WSNs
in order to establish their suitability for a typical set of
monitoring and supervision functionalities required by urban-

scale Smart Grids applications. In the WSNs, sensor nodes use

IEEE 802.15.4 standard for communication.
Zigbee is used in this paper, since it is a strong candidate
for smart grid energy management applications. Zigbee is a
short-range, low-data rate, energy-efficient wireless
technology that is based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.
Zigbee utilizes 16 channels in the 2.4 GHz ISM band
worldwide, 13 channels in the 915MHzband in North America,
and one channel in the 868 MHz band in Europe. The
supported data rates are 250 kbps, 100 kbps (available in
IEEE 802.15.4-2006), 40 kbps, and 20 kbps, and its range
varies between 30m90m indoors. Zigbee can support up to
64,000 nodes (devices). Zigbee certified devices can work for
several years without the need for battery replacement due to
the low duty cycle mechanism.
The performance evaluation of WSNs has been carried out
in the NS2 (Network Simulator 2). Different ad-hoc routing
protocols have been employed to asses which routing
protocols perform better in terms of latency, packet delivery
ratio and throughput. The results obtained show that the
application of WSNs based communication services exhibits a
set of intrinsic advantages, particularly useful in Smart Grids
control with optimum performance and enabling real-time
monitoring.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In
section II related works have been presented. Section III
introduces different kinds of ad-hoc routing protocols for
IEEE standard 802.15.4. In section IV an overview of NS-2
architecture is shown and section V consists of evaluation
criteria and parameters for the simulation in NS-2.Section VI
summarizes simulation results and finally section VII
concludes the paper.
II. RELATED WORKS
In the literature, WSNs performance evaluations have
been studied in several works. In [5], the authors evaluate the
performance of in home energy management (iHEM), then
compared iHEM to optimization-based residential energy
management (OREM).They also evaluate packet delivery
ratio, latency and jitter in their proposed Wireless Sensor
Home Area Network (WSHAN) for iHEM.
In [6], the authors uses IEEE 802.11s standard for
evaluating wireless multigate mesh routing to improve latency
and throughput performance. They used neighbour nodes to
reach one of the gateways in the network in multi hop fashion
to reduce latency and throughput. But average end to end
delay increases significantly when bit rate increases.
In [7], wireless Link-Quality Estimation has been done in
smart grid environments using different estimators such as
Window Mean with Exponentially Weighted Moving Average
(WMEWMA), Expected Transmission Count (ETX), and
four-bit link quality estimation methods employed to find the
best one. The criteria for performance evaluation were packet
delivery ratio, average number of packet retransmissions,
average number of parent changes, average number of hops
and average communication delay.

In the paper [8], the role of pervasive and cooperative

sensor networks in smart grids communication has been
evaluated. The authors analyzed the performance of IEEE
802.15.4 based WSNs. They used qualnet developer platform
simulation environment. They observed that latency increases
due to rain, number of hops, end to end delay, and end nodes
delay to coordinator (number of active connections effectively
supported by the network). They proposed ad-hoc network in
order to improve the network performances in terms of data
latency, number of simultaneous and active connections.
III. ROUTING PROTOCOLS FOR WSNS
Large number of sensor nodes in the smart grid makes it
inevitable to employ self-healing, reconfigurable network for
faster response and control of the grid. Low cost WSNs pave
the way in this purpose but latency is the great problem [10].
To alleviate the latency problem choice of routing protocol is
one of the prominent solutions. Because IP-based global
addressing scheme is not possible as wireless networks have
to accommodate large number of sensor nodes [12]. Large
number of traffic from sensor nodes to a specific sink,
transmission power, on-board energy, processing capacity,
storage limitations of sensor nodes require careful resource
management.
The aforementioned limitations of sensor nodes demand a
careful implementation of WSNs. To prepare efficient WSNs
different routing algorithms have been coined to improve
latency, packet delivery ratio and traffic congestion. Ad-hoc
routing protocol can improve the latency of WSNs for
extreme environmental condition, large traffic handling, selfhealing [9, 10, 11]. There are two kinds of ad-hoc routing
protocols: table-driven protocol maintains routing table of the
whole network and on-demand protocols keep routes when it
is required. There is another type of protocol which is the
combination of table driven and on-demand protocol.
Destination Sequence Distance Vector (DSDV):
DSDV is a proactive routing protocol which maintains a
routing table containing all routes between all source
destination pairs. DSDV is a hop-by-hop distance vector
routing protocol where each node maintains routing
information in the form of look up table which broadcasted
periodically.
Dynamic Source Routing (DSR):
DSR uses source routing where each data packet header
contains complete route of the nodes through which it passes.
So intermediate nodes do not need to maintain updated
routing table for the packets they forward as the packets
already have the information for routing decisions.
Ad-hoc Distance Vector (AODV):
AODV is the combination of two routing protocols DSR
and DSDV. It uses route discovery and route maintenance
from DSR as well as hop-by-hop routing, sequence numbers
and periodic beacons from DSDV.
AOMDV protocol:
An extension to AODV is ad-hoc on-demand Multipath
Distance Vector (AOMDV) routing protocol which is for
computing multiple loop-free and link disjoint paths. For each

destination, along with the respective hop counts it contains a

list of the routing entries of the next-hops. Same sequence
number is allocated to all next hops. This helps for keeping
track of a route. A node maintains the assigned hop count,
which is the maximum hop count for all the paths at each node.
Loop freedom is assured for a node by accepting another path
to destination if it has a less number of hop counts than the
assigned for that destination. AOMDV allows intermediate
nodes to reply to RREQs, while still selecting disjoint paths.
During route discovery, its message overhead is high, due to
increased flooding. Since it is a multipath routing protocol, the
destination replies to the multiple RREQs those results are in
longer overhead [13].
IV. NETWORK SIMULATION MODEL (NS2)
NS2 simulator deal with transport layer protocols, routing
protocols, different types of queues, link layer mechanisms.
This simulator gives the essence of dealing with practical
network structure components such as routers, switches,
bridges, wired and wireless nodes. Once simulation completed
NS2 produces trace files which keep the record of every event
in the simulation line by line. NS2 consists of C++
programming language, Tcl and Object Tcl interface allowing
the user to put inputs in the simulation script of the network
model. User can define network with different topologies,
standards, protocols consisting wired and wireless nodes,
routers, bridges, switches, links and shared media.

Figure -1: Layered structure of NS2

Layered structure of NS2 is presented here in the Figure 1. The event schedulers, traffic pattern, network components
are implemented in C++ and can be merged to Tcl script. Core
structure of network is built on C++ code and Tcl is on the top
of it to make the simulation handling much easier to carry out.
The overview of the network can be seen then upon the Tcl
level. AWK script is then used to measure the performance
evaluation of the simulated network from the trace files. These
are the things which are combined in NS2 software.

V. EVALUATION OF PROPOSED WSNS FOR

DIFFERENT AD-HOC ROUTING PROTOCOLS
Performance Metrics used for evaluation of routing
protocols are [9, 10, 11, 12]:
Packet Delivery Ratio
Measures the percentage of total number of data packets
received out of total number of data packets sent.
Routing Over Head
The total number of routing packets transmitted during
simulation. Routing overhead is important as it measures the
scalability of a protocol, the degree to which it will function in
congested or low bandwidth environments.
End-to-End Delay of Data Packets
This metric measure the average time it takes to route a
data packet from the source node to the destination node. The
lower the end-to-end delay the better the application
performance. If the value of end-to-end delay is high then it
means the protocol performance is not good due to the
network congestion.
TABLE II
SIMULATION PARAMETERS
Simulation Dimension
Number of Nodes
Propagation
Routing queue
Mac protocol
Antenna
Traffic type

500*500
Vary according to experiment
Two Ray Ground
Drop tail
802.15.4
Omni Directional
cbr

Wireless Sensor Node

Figure- 2 Multi-hop ad-hoc WSN

Throughput
Total data traffic in bits/sec successfully received and
forwarded to the higher layer. Throughput shows protocols
successful deliveries for a time; this means that the higher
throughput, the better will be the protocol performance. It
measures the amount of data received by the destination node
within certain period of time. In multi-hop environment, the
throughput is computed at the final destination as the
intermediate nodes are responsible of relaying the packets.
The proposed wireless architecture consisting 25, 16, 9
nodes with 90 meters spacing are arranged in grid pattern. A

network consisting of 25 wireless sensor nodes is depicted in

the Figure -2.
VI. RESULTS
Four ad-hoc routing protocols DSDV, DSR, AODV and
AOMDV have been used for the performance evaluation with
varying node sizes 25,16 and 9 in grid pattern where last one
node is used as sink node for all nodes. In this simulation only
two criteria latency and packet delivery ratio have been used
for performance measurement. Packet size has been chosen
256 bytes and packet interval was introduced to emulate
bandwidth of the system. Here, the packet inter-arrival time
has been chosen from 0.02s to 1s meaning bandwidth of the
system will vary from 2kbps to 100kbps.

Figure -3.2: Packet interval vs. Packet delivery ratio for 25 grid connected
nodes

Figure- 4.1: Packet interval vs. latency for 16 grid connected nodes
Figure-3.1: Packet interval vs. latency for 25 grid connected nodes

Variation of latency is presented with different packet

inter-arrival time in the Figure- 3.1.Actaully packet interarrival was introduced to simulate the variation of network
speed and to observe the characteristics of it with applying
different ad-hoc routing protocols. It can be observed that
when packet inter-arrival time is 0.02s (that means the system
speed is about 100 kbps) all of the routing protocols showed
high latency as high as around 0.2 s for AOMDV except DSR
which showed as low as 8 ms. As the packet arrival time
increases all of the routing protocols showed lowered latency
for the same system. That means when the system generates
less traffic it can perform better. The packet delivery ratio is
presented in the figure 3.2 and it can be observed that the
systems packet delivery ratio is best for DSR with varying
traffic generation rate which is around 90%.
Performance indication of WSN is also observed for
different network sizes such for 16 and 9 wireless nodes
system which is presented in the figures 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2.
It also observed that Packet delivery ratio and latency
improved much for smaller networks as evident from the
figures available for 16 and 9 nodes network. Such as for a
WSN with 9 nodes shows 100% packet delivery ratio and
latency of 4 ms which evident from figure 5.2 and 5.1
respectively.

Figure- 4.2: Packet interval vs. packet delivery ratio for 16 grid connected
nodes

Figure- 5.1: Packet interval vs. latency for 9 grid connected nodes

and control of smart capacitor bank that can monitor and

control capacitor banks remotely, Volt/VAR Control,
Substation circuit breaker trip coil status and control, State
Estimation, Fault Detection/Isolation.
REFERENCES

Figure- 5.2: Packet interval vs. packet delivery ratio for 9 grid connected
nodes

With analysis of the graph it can be infer that for large or

small wireless sensor network only DSR routing protocol
showing better performance than any other ad-hoc routing
protocols like DSDV, AODV and AOMDV in terms of
improved latency and higher packet delivery ratio.
VII.
CONCLUSION
Network simulator tool has been employed to analyze the
performance of ad-hoc routing protocols using the above
simulation parameters. It can be concluded that WSNs
perform better with comparatively low speed communication
(2kbps~100kbps) which makes it suitable for smart grid
applications like AMI, distributed automation, distributed
energy resources and storage, electric transportation,
distribution grid management according to the communication
requirements of the smart grid as indicated by the Table-I [3].
And necessary routing protocol can be DSR ad-hoc routing
protocol to operate WSN better. It is
also observed that WSNs meet the latency (700ms~4ms)
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device in distributed manner for the last mile two-way
communication which makes it a promising option for the
smart grid communication. In future the performance of the
WSNs can be analyzed with hardware implementation in a
real smart grid environment as Florida International
University has state of the art smart grid test bed facility. The
performance of WSN then can be compared with that of the
existing wired communication infrastructure. WSNs can also
be implemented for operation monitoring of the smart grid

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