Transport layer performance analysis and optimization for smart metering infrastructure

In a smart power grid, collecting data from a large number of smart meters and sensors over the conventional one-hop transmission control protocol (TCP) communication is prone to a high packet loss rate and degraded throughput due to the ineffectiveness of the TCP congestion control mechanism. The Split and Aggregated TCP (SA-TCP) proposes upgrading intermediate devices (known as regional collectors or RCs) to combine meters’ TCP connections and forward data over a unified TCP connection to the utility server. This paper provides a comprehensive performance analysis of the SA-TCP scheme. It studies the impact of varying various parameters on the scheme, including the impact of network link capacity, buffering capacity of RCs, propagation delay between the meters and the utility server, and finally the number of RCs utilized as SA-TCP aggregators. The performance results show that by adjusting those parameters, it is possible to tune throughput of a smart metering network to the desired amount while keeping the deployment cost minimal.