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Smart meters with TV gray spaces connectivity: A feasibility study for two reference network topologies

With an increasing demand for monitoring energy consumption at granularity levels down to single household appliances, it is necessary to develop new means to collect sensor measurements in a robust and cost-efficient manner. The smart grid paradigm foresees using wireless links for data transfer, albeit no dedicated spectrum bands have been designated for this purpose. In this paper we study the feasibility of opportunistic spectrum access for smart grids, and focus on underlay spectrum sharing over occupied TV channels. These frequency bands, which are commonly denoted as TV gray spaces, provide superior propagation characteristics, but are locally used by high-power (mostly DTV) broadcasting transmitters. For selected reference geometries of intra-meter and meter-to-operator communications, we study the smart meter performance (in terms of achievable throughput and transmission range), and the necessary power limits. We compare our results from a small-scale measurement campaigns against existing wireless technologies for low-power communications in other adjacent bands. Our results show that wall shielding and fading in indoor to outdoor propagation channels sufficiently protects the primary system from the interference introduced by gray space meter-to-meter communications, but that the required transmit powers to send operations data from indoor meters to outdoor collection point severely limit the applicability of TV gray spaces for such network topologies.