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A scalable load-balancing scheme for advanced metering infrastructure network

The advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) network based on wireless mesh network (WMN) is composed of smart meters (SMs), relay nodes, and data aggregation points (DAPs). Relay nodes deliver metering data sent by SMs to DAPs that forwards the data to a headend in a smart grid. The nature of routing algorithms in the AMI network may cause an inefficient use of network resources such that some of the DAPs are heavily loaded while the other DAPs are lightly loaded. In this paper, by distinguishing the DAP selection process from a routing process, we devise a load-balancing scheme that distributes metering data to multiple DAPs. In the proposed scheme, a relay node probabilistically selects its serving DAP by explicitly considering the congestion levels of the DAPs to distribute the loads of congested DAPs to lightly loaded DAPs fast. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme stabilizes the AMI network fast after a DAP is congested. In addition, the proposed scheme further avoids unnecessary changes of the serving DAP by appropriately considering the hop distance from a relay node to its serving DAP, which reduces congestion periods of the AMI network and the packet loss rates of the DAPs.