Integration Facilitation of Scheduling Algorithms in the Smart Grid Communications over 4G Networks

The smart grid is a promising technology of the next-generation electrical systems which involves wireless networks. Such Long Term Evolution (LTE), which has been proposed and developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), is expected to be a preferable technology due to its high data rate and low delay. Due to the fact that smart grid requires real-time communications, scheduling mechanism becomes more important since it distributes the available resources to the users taking into account channel status and the Quality of Services (QoS) requirements. However, LTE has not been proposed for smart grid communications so that scheduling algorithms which implemented in LTE network must be evaluated accordingly before integrated in the smart grid communications. This paper evaluates the performance of three scheduling algorithms in the smart grid for both real-time applications and non-real time applications as well. Moreover, the performance is evaluated in terms of delay, throughput and fairness index. In addition, this paper desires to facilitate the integration scheduling process in the smart grid communications. Keywords—smart grid, 4G, LTE, smart applications, Scheduling, resource allocation