A testbed based performance evaluation of smart grid wireless neighborhood area networks routing protocols

Smart Grid networks have a data communication network associated with the electrical energy distribution infrastructure. This network connects all the sub- scribers’ homes with the data control centers of the supplying companies, which in turn have access to the global Internet network. They are in charge of transporting the needed information between the elements that comprise the electricity network and the control centers. A part of these networks is the so-called Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs), which transports the data from the subscriber’s home to some data concentrators. This article presents a comparison of the performance of different routing protocols that can be used in this part of the data network, when a wireless technology is selected. For this comparison, a hardware testbed has been implemented, with a simple initial configuration, which allows the comparison of the OLSR v1, OLSR v2 and HWMP protocols. The numerical results are presented in terms of network throughput, protocol overhead, number of retransmissions, net- work transit and packet transfer times.This work was supported by the Spanish Research Council under project MAGOS (TEC2017-84197-C4-3-R), and Juan Pablo Astudillo León is the recipient of a full scholarship from the Secretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (SENESCYT), Ecuador.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version