1
IoT Architecture and Routing for MV and LV
Smart Grid
S. A. Alharthi and P. Johnson, Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK and M. A. Alharthi,
Saudi Electricity Company, Makkah, Saudi Arabia
 The traditional electric power system design is not efficient
Abstract— Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are cost
effective for numerous applications including smart cities,
environmental monitoring, industry process control, etc.
Hence, WSNs form the major hardware infrastructure for
the Internet of Things (IoT). Nowadays, homes and cities
become smarter by installing sensors and actuators to
manage energy consumption through WSNs and IoT
integration. According to the demand, loads are shut off or
can be shifted to off-peak times. The 2030 and 2050 visions
of Electrical power system are not only to deliver energy
from suppliers to consumers but also to integrate
information and communication technology (ICT) into the
electrical power system to reduce the cost, optimize the
energy and increase the reliability. Though Supervisory
Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is used to monitor
high power transmission, low and medium voltages are less
monitored and controlled. This paper proposes an
architecture for IoT smart grid (SG) to monitor and
control low and medium voltage networks. Since WSNs is
being incorporated, careful designing of energy efficient
routing protocol is critical due to limited power of sensor
nodes (SNs) and the spread of information in WSNs. This
motivates our research to propose an IPv6 compatible
hierarchical routing protocol based on clustering for IoT
SG. The simulation results of the proposed IPv6 routing
protocol achieves extended network lifetime for WSNs and
shorter delay compared to standardized RPL.
Index Terms-- Smart Grid (SG); IPv6/LowPAN; Collection
Tree Protocol (CTP); RPL; LOADng; IETF; information and
communication technology (ICT);
I.INTRODUCTION
N EXT generation electrical power systems will benefit
from the explosive advancements in the information and
communication technology (ICT) to operate, manage and
deliver the electric power economically, safely and reliably.
Mr. Alharthi’s research studies is sponsored by the Royal Saudi Embassy
at London.
Corresponding Saad A. Alharthi is with the Department of Electronics and
Electrical Engineering, Liverpool John Moores University, Byrom Street,
Liverpool, L3 3AF, UK, (e-mail: s.a.alharthi@2014.ljmu.ac.uk).
Princy L. Johnson, is with the Department of Electronics and Electrical
Engineering, Liverpool John Moores University, Byrom Street, Liverpool L3
3AF, UK, (e-mail: P.Johnson@ljmu.ac.uk).
Mohammed A. Alharthi is the Head of the Department of Distribution
Substation Maintenance, Makkah Branch, Saudi Electricity Company,
Makkah 386-25460, Saudi Arabia, (e-mail: 78742@se.com.sa)
for current market needs or addressing up-to-date issues due to
the state-of-the art technology used at that time. Recent years
have witnessed a rapid growth in smart wireless devices which
can communicate with each other or to access the Internet.
Internet of things (IoT) is a network of these connected smart
devices to the Internet. Thus, the IoT can be integrated to
monitor and control the electric power system which allows
immediate response to power outage and efficient resource
management. Hence, the electric power system across the
world would greatly benefit from adopting the transition from
the traditional design towards the Smart Grid (SG).
An example of this transition is the advanced metering
infrastructure (AMI) where the two-way communication is
established between IP enabled smart devices and electric
utility companies. The AMI has been the foundation of the SG
[1]. The 2030 and 2050 visions of SG are to utilize the data
from multiple ICT infrastructure and use the IoT solutions in
the design and development of SG to manage the utility
companies’ assets and to improve their services.
The IoT has evolved from its conception stage and a new
era of the Internet called Web 3.0 or semantic web has started.
This revolution will change the way business is being handled.
Several studies, surveys and reports anticipate that the number
of smart devices connected to the Internet will be more than 20
billion by 2020 [2]. The IoT market is huge which requires
huge investments. International data Corporation surveyed
2300 executives from different organizations in 15 countries
about their business strategies towards IoT. Around 50 %
respondents said that they have already deployed IoT solutions
and around 60 % said that IoT is strategic to their business [3].
Electric utility companies are among the largest businesses,
which should go forward on strategic plans for IoT SG. The
decision is made by calculating the payback period by dividing
the investment amount by the annual profit of the investment.
The initiative towards the IoT SG offers multidimensional
ways to solve several problems such as power outages,
resource management, emission, energy waste, etc. with the
new emerging applications and services of the SG and IoT.
Open connectivity foundation (OCF) is a group of major
players in communication, electronics and IT industries whose
goal is to develop an open connectivity standard models for
IoT. This group is led by Microsoft, Cisco, GE Digital, Intel,
ARRIS, Samsung, CableLabs, Qualcomm and Electrolux [4].
OCF ensures interoperability of the connected devices in the
IoT settings. This guarantees remarkable enhancements of the
smart world and customer satisfaction from their endeavor.

Cisco proposed a reference model for IoT in the 2013 IoT
World Forum [5]. This model consists of seven layers or levels.
The first level is the physical layer where all types of smart
wireless devices or sensor nodes (SNs) collect data and send
them to the upper layers. Due to the resource constraint nature
of the SNs and the spread of information in wireless sensor
networks (WSNs), the design of routing protocol needs to be
more energy efficient as communication consumes most of the
energy.
There are various IPv6 protocols which have been proposed
for IoT routing. Some examples include collection tree
protocol (CTP), the routing protocol for low-power and lossy
networks; LLN, (RPL) and its different versions, the
Lightweight On-demand Ad hoc Distance-vector routing
protocol - next generation (LOADng) and Least Path
Interference Beaconing Protocol (LIBP). CTP and RPL are the
benchmarks to evaluate the performance of new IoT routing
protocols.
We propose an architecture for IoT SG to monitor and
control the medium and low voltage (MV and LV) electric
networks. In this paper, we also discuss an IPv6 compatible
zone based energy aware hierarchical clustering routing
protocol for IoT SG, to extend the lifetime of WSNs through
individual SNs' energy conservation. If the sink is within the
range of the SNs, they can forward their data directly. The
farthest are elected as cluster parents (CPs) for other SNs. The
SNs are grouped into clusters. The cluster members or orphans
build routing trees rooted at CPs. The CPs in lower level zones
estimate the cost for each path and choose the least cost
multihop paths to forward their data to the sink.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section
II presents the related work. In Section III, the IoT SG
architecture for medium and low voltage networks is proposed.
In Section IV, heterogeneous network and radio model are
defined. Section V provides the details of our proposed IPv6
routing for IoT SG. Section VI presents the performance
evaluation and analysis of the proposed routing protocol
compared to known RPL and CTP. The conclusion of this
research is presented in Section VII
II. RELATED WORK
IEEE has more than 100 active and proposed standards to
help in the transformation from traditional electric power
system to the SG. The National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) has published its Framework and
Roadmap for SG Release 1.0 which included more than 20 of
the IEEE standards for SG [6]. The NIST's report has
envisaged IP-based networks to be used as communication
networks in SG.
The current Internet infrastructure cannot accommodate the
explosive growth of IP-enabled device-to-device (D2D)
communication and the emerging applications where the
Volume of data generated from the Variety of sources in the
IoT is unprecedented. The Value of information mined from
the gathered data and the Velocity to retrieve data with
Veracity in the IoT is important for decision making. Volume,
Variety, Value, Velocity and Veracity are the key components
that make up Big Data complex to handle. Big data and Cloud
2
computing are key technologies in the IoT revolution of the
digital age. Hence, communication network architecture needs
to be modified to meet the future requirements. Cloud and Big
data platforms are the center of next generation internet
architecture.
IPv6 routing protocols for IoT is a hot research topic due to
fast growing IoT applications. There are several important
challenges related to security and QoS that must be
investigated to make IoT applications viable, which are beyond
the scope of this study.
CTP was the initiative towards designing energy efficient
routing protocol for WSNs which takes into consideration the
challenges facing existing protocols. CTP employs three
strategies to quickly adapt to the rapid topology changes
(network agility) and to reliably deliver data in bursty and
dynamic wireless networks. The strategies are: four-bit link
estimator, datapath validation and adaptive beaconing [7].
The successor to the CTP is RPL where CTP has laid the
basis for RPL. Both CTP and RPL are distance vector routing
protocols relying on the Trickle algorithm. They use a
proactive mechanism where routes are established even though
they may not be used, which causes significant energy
consumption accompanied with control packet overheads.
RPL has been proposed by the Internet Engineering Task
Force/Routing over low-power and lossy links working group
(IETF/ROLL) for IPv6/LowPAN. RFC 6550 defines RPL
where the term RFC stands for "request for comments" and it
has been approved as an IETF standard since 2012 [8]. The
design of RPL is based on directed acyclic graph (DAG) where
all edges terminate at one or more roots with no cycles or loops
exist in the paths.
DAG roots and Destination-Oriented DAG (DODAG) or
sometimes called a single DAG root do not have outgoing
edges. The DODAG root is the DAG root of the DODAG. The
way the DODAG tree is built depends on the DAG's objective
function (OF). The instances of RPL compute the rank of each
node using the OF to construct the DODAG. The patters of
traffic supported by RPL are Multipoint-to-Point (MP2P),
Point-to-Point (P2P) and Point-to-Multipoint (P2MP).
The packet information in RPL has control packets and data
packets. The main control messages used in RPL are DODAG
Information Object (DIO), DODAG Information Solicitation
(DIS), Destination Advertisement Object (DAO), DAO-
Acknowledgement (DAO-ACK) and consistency check (CC).
In P2P and MP2P traffic patterns, DIO and DIS are necessary;
however, DAO is required only for MP2P.
The Objective function zero (OF0) is defined in RFC 6552
as the default OF for RPL. RFC 6550 does not provide
definitions for the OF because the OFs may differ according to
the applications. The OF0 is used to calculate the rank of a
node. The child rank is equal to the rank of the best parent plus
an increment. The OF0 chooses the best parent based on the
following criteria: DAG is grounded, DAG preferred metric
and the rank of the DAG [9].
LOADng is an IETF draft to adapt Ad hoc On-demand
Distance-Vector (AODV) specified in RFC 3651 as routing
protocol for LLNs. Like CTP and RPL, LOADng is a distance

vector routing but it uses a reactive mechanism instead of
proactive where routes are established only on demand. In
[10], the performance of LOADng and RPL are compared in
smart home application. Their results show that RPL performs
better than LOADng.
LIBP [11] implements a routing algorithm known as the
Least Path Interference Beaconing Algorithm (LIBA) to
construct the routing spanning tree rooted at the sink. Like
CTP and RPL, the sink initiates a beaconing process which is
repeated by the SNs within on hop distance from the sink and
their neighbors thereafter to discover routes or paths. LIBP
selects paths that have least traffic or weights where children
select parents which have less number of children.
Cluster-based RPL (CRPL) was proposed in [12]. CRPL
outperforms RPL and opportunistic RPL (ORPL). Wang et. al
[13] proposed RPL based routing for AMI which gives another
glimpse that AODV fails to achieve better performance due to
flooding strategy which was validated through simulation.
One drawback of RPL is its implementation complexity
which makes interoperability between devices a hard task.
Although simplicity and flexibility are features of LOADng,
flooding and route recovery strategies used in the current
version cause its performance less comparable to RPL. The
linked list in LIBP at each SN with its neighbors is the major
source of energy consumption and control packet overhead.
The main goal of this paper is to propose an architecture for
IoT SG to monitor and control MV and LV electric network.
Besides, we propose an IPv6 compatible zone based energy
aware hierarchical clustering and multi hop routing protocol
for IoT SG to improve the performance of routing algorithms
and to extend the lifetime of WSNs as will be discussed in the
subsequent sections.
III. PROPOSED IOT SG ARCHITECTURE FOR ELECTRIC
DISTRIBUTION MV AND LV NETWORKS
Generation, transmission and distribution are three main
strategic business units (SBU) in electric power system. In
some countries, the transmission and distribution are joined to
connect electric power suppliers and consumers. For instance,
the national grid (NG) in Great Britain connects England,
Scotland and Wales, hence, the electric power supply in one
region can be carried to feed the demand in any region. Control
centers are responsible for monitoring and controlling the
generation and transmission through state-of-the-art
technology and sophisticated SCADA systems.
Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) is the largest electric
utility company in the Middle East and North Africa. The
vision of SEC towards SG coincides with the government's
2030 vision and the world's 2030 and 2050 visions for SG.
SEC has sponsored many conferences for SG and it is the
sponsor of SASG 2017 conference. Several renewable energy
projects have been launched by SEC to supply the high
demands from consumers. Their initiatives towards green
energy and SG have helped them remain competitive both at
regional and global level.
The scope of this research is limited to the MV and LV
electric distribution network in SEC due to less monitoring and
control of the network, which begins at 13.8 kV, 33kV or 69
3
kV switchgears and ends at the consumers as shown in Fig. 1.
Residential, commercial, industrial and farming units are the
types of consumers for SEC.
Figure 1: Single line diagram for MV and LV Electric network
To help with the new trend towards SG, an IoT SG
architecture to monitor and control the electric distribution of
MV and LV networks is proposed by the authors as shown in
Fig. 2. This will enable SEC with a completely innovative
solution to reduce the losses, which in turn will increase the
reliability of the distribution network. This will empower the
SEC to efficiently plan, design, operate, and manage its
electric distribution network.
Our proposed architecture for IoT SG assumes that the
apparatus of MV and LV electric networks are equipped with
smart electronic devices. Furthermore, it is also assumed that
the network infrastructure for communication exists. The main
point to emphasize here is that both SEC and consumers have
opportunities to benefit from IoT integration with SG.
On the consumer side, they can control homes, offices and
buildings remotely where phone or iPad applications
empowered with ZigBee sensors and IoT gateway. Their bills
can be managed by shifting loads to off-peak times and lower
rate tariffs. Green energy sources such as solar panels or wind
turbines are other alternatives to them.
On the SEC side, the switchgears monitoring and control
can be part of the IoT SG architecture. The underground and
overhead MV feeders are provided with fault detector and
locator. The remote terminal unit (RTU) and motorized ring
main unit (RMU) substations or transformers are provided
with access point to communicate through the internet. The
maximum demand MDI and earth fault EFI indications and
monitoring against thefts can be reported instantaneously to
the control centers. The load management module (LMM) can
coordinate load shedding through the collected smart meter
readings from consumers and the substations in the area. The
backhaul communication infrastructure can be fiber optics,
wireless, or power line communication (PLC).
The control center monitors and controls the electric
distribution MV and LV networks through distribution or
energy management systems DMS or EMS. Finally, it is worth
pointing out that distribution automation system (DAS) has
been successfully implemented in SEC Makkah to provide real
time supervision on its distribution substations.

Figure 2: An architecture for IoT SG to monitor and control the electric distribution MV and LV networks
IV. HETEROGENEOUS NETWORK AND ENERGY MODELS
This section defines the network model for IoT based
heterogeneous WSNs used in our simulation and the radio
energy model which is used to compute the energy dissipated
by the SNs.
A. Heterogeneous Network Model
A heterogeneous WSN having N=20 SNs are randomly
distributed in a 50x50 square sensor field as shown in Fig.3.
The sink or base station (BS) is static and located at the center
with no limited energy. The SNs are unaware about their
location and fixed after deployment and each has a unique ID
which is IP address in this case.
Figure 3: The N heterogeneous SNs distributed in a squqre area
The heterogeneous WSN assumes m fraction of N total SNs
are advanced, that is, N*m are advanced each with a factor α
additional energy Eadv = (1+α) * Eo and N*(1-m) are normal
each with an initial energy Enrm = Eo. The total initial energy of
the network Et is given by:
Et = N*(1-m)*Eo+N*m(1+ α) Eo=N*(1+ α) Eo (1)
B. Radio Energy Model
The model for radio energy consumption in [14] is used.
The energy consumptions in the transmitter circuit ETx are due
to running radio electronics and transmitter amplifier
ETx (B,d) = Eelec * B + ℰamp * B (2)
4
ℰamp is the energy dissipation in power amplifier and it depends
on power loss in the channel model used. For example, d 2
power loss in free space ℰfs and d 4 power loss in multipath
fading ℰmp or sometimes called two-ray model.
do (4)
The energy consumption in the receiver circuit is due to
running radio electronics only. Hence, ERx (B) is given by
ERx (B) = Eelec * B (5)
V. PROPOSED PROTOCOLS
Our proposed IPv6 is based on hierarchical clustering
routing for energy optimization and less control overhead. The
minimum rank with hysteresis objective function RPL-
MRHOF is modified based on the low-cost ETX (expected
transmission time) rank computation method in [12].
A. Initial Phase
The initial phase begins with hello message from the sink
which sets time to live (TTL) timer and time slots schedule to
all SNs to advertise themselves. Based on the TTL and the
information among the SNs, the sink divides the sensor field
into logical smaller zones. The SNs within a threshold distance
d1 ≤ range communicate directly with the sink and will be in
zone-0. The SNs within the threshold distance d2= 2* d1 will
be in zone-1 and so on.
B. Network Configuration
The network configuration phase consists of two stages; i.e.,
cluster parent selection and clusters formation.
Cluster Parent (CP) selection
The sink selects the preferred CPs based on zone ID,
residual energy and the weights of supported children or SNs.
If the threshold energy of CP is reached, ECP-Threshold, the sink
elects other SNs as CPs the same way and this process
continues. Each CP computes the routing cost to the sink and
chooses the route with the minimum ETX.
 5

The ratio Ei(r)/Ea(r) is used to select SNs with highest

energy as CPs. The Ei(r) is the residual energy and Ea(r) is the
average energy for the current round given by

Clusters formation
Once k CPs are elected, they broadcast DIO messages to
other SNs. Except SNs closest to the sink, SNs add the DIO
sender to their parent list and make CP with highest received
signal strength indicator RSSI as default parents. Each CP sets
up time slots and sends them to its children or members. After
that all the SNs within the cluster turn off their radio (sleep
state) except during their transmission time slot.
Figure 4: The screenshot for Border IoT Gateway
C. Steady State phase
The SNs have limited power and capabilities which requires
If n denotes the SNs closest to the sink, the energy as little power consumption as possible in communication to
dissipated by each CP, ECP, is the energy due to receiving data conserve their power which extend their lifetime. This will in
from [(N-n/k)-1] SNs, aggregation of the received data and turn extend the overall network lifetime for WSNs. The
transmission of the aggregated data to the sink average power consumption in our proposed IPv6 routing is
less as compared to the standards RPL-OF0 and RPL-MRHOF
The energy dissipated in k cluster Ek-cluster is given by as shown in Fig. 5. This is due to the low-cost ETX rank
computation but power consumption is trade-off with PDR.
Ek-cluster = k*ECP + ETx-NCP (8)
where ETx-NCP is the energy due to transmission of data from
(N-n) SNs. The total energy dissipated per round (Eround) is
calculated as
Eround = k * ECP + B [ (N-k) * (Eelec + ɛfs * d 2 toCP)] (9)

VI. PERFORMANCE SIMULATION

Instant Contiki-3.0 and VMware workstation 12 player
virtual machine which has Ubuntu 14.2 are used to make
COOJA network simulator for Contiki OS works. The
simulation setup and the parameters for emulated Sky Tmotes
are given in Table 1.
Table 1: Simulation Parameters
Figure 5: The average power consumption in standardized RPL and Proposed
Description Value
The minimum hop (Min-Hop) is an important metric to
Emulated motes Tmote Sky evaluate end-to-end delay. Thus, minimum distance between
Simulation time 1000 s SNs and roots (CPs and sink) gives less delay. Critical
applications require short delay, td (0.2 < td < 0.5 s). RPL is a
Radio Channel UDGM model proactive routing which gives it advantage over on-demand
Communication range 10 m routing. The end-to-end delay for the proposed routing and
standardized RPL is shown in Fig. 6 with Min-Hop is set to 3.
Network size 50*50 m2
Transmission power 0 dBm
Packet size 512 bytes
Transmission rate 1, 10 pkt/min

First, a screenshot for simulation scenario for the border IoT

gateway is shown in Fig. 4. Second, to evaluate the proposed
IPv6 routing, it is compared with standards RPL OF0 and
MRHOF. The performance metrics used are: average power
consumption, packet delay and packet delivery ratio PDR.
Finally, the simulation is repeated ten times and the average
values are plotted for each metric. Figure 6: The packet delay in standardized RPL and Proposed protocols

Link quality indicator (LQI) is the metric used to measure
the PDR. If the link is reliable, in other words LQI is high, the
probability of packet reception increases and vice versa. It is
known fact that RPL suffers in terms of PDR. The comparison
between our proposed IPv6 routing and the standardized RPL
protocols is shown in Fig. 7 with LQI is set to 0.5.
Figure 7: The PDR in standardized RPL and Proposed protocols
VII. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In our research, an architecture for IoT SG to monitor and
control the electric distribution MV and LV networks has been
proposed. The architecture utilizes the advances in the ICT and
emerging technologies and integrate them to the SG. Also,
IPv6 routing protocol is proposed where IoT gateway connect
IP-enabled smart devices to the internet. We evaluate the
performance of our proposed IPv6 routing against standards
RPL-OF0 and RPL-MRHOF in terms of the average power
consumption, packet delay and PDR using COOJA network
simulator for Contiki OS. The simulation results show that the
proposed protocol performed better than the standardized RPL
protocols. Our proposed IoT SG architecture and IPv6 routing
protocol can be part of DAS which will be our future work.
VIII. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would gratefully thank the Royal Saudi Embassy
at London for sponsoring Mr. Saad Alharthi’s research studies.
IX. REFERENCES
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X. BIOGRAPHIES
Saad Alharthi received BSc degree in Electrical
and Computers Engineering from Umm Al-Qura
Universit, Makkah, Saudi Arabia, in 1999. From
1999 to 2006, he worked in private sector. Funded
through Albaha University, he received a ME in
Computers Engineering from Old Dominion
University, VA, USA in 2009 where he returned to
Albaha until 2014. He is currently working towards
his PhD in Electronics and Electrical Engineering
at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.
Princy Johnson received BE followed by a ME in
Electronics from GCT, Coimbatore and Guindy
Engineering College, Madras, India, respectively,
both with distinction. Through Commonwealth
Scholarship, she received her Ph.D. from King’s
College London. From 2000 to 2002, she worked at
Nortel Networks UK Ltd during which she had a
patent. She is at Liverpool John Moores University
and her research interests include energy-efficient
protocols for mobile, wireless and sensor networks.
Mohammed Alharthi received BSc degree in
Electrical and Computers Engineering from Umm
Al-Qura Universit, Makkah, Saudi Arabia, in 2008
with distinction. From 2008 to present, he is
working with Saudi Electricity Company, Makkah
Branch, Distribution network maintenance during
which he has Rewards, Medals and certificates. He
is the head of the Department of Distribution
Substation Maintenance. His research interests are
work safety, smart grid and leadership development