A New Framework for Increasing the Sustainability of Infrastructure Measurement of Smart Grid

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is one of the most significant applications of the Smart Grid. It is used to measure, collect, and analyze data on power consumption.  In the AMI network, the smart meters traffics are aggregated in the intermediate aggregators and forwarded to the Meter Data Management System (MDMS). The infrastructure used in this network should be reliable, real-time and scalable in order to guarantee reliable and timely transmission of information. In this paper, we propose an SDN (Software-Defined Network)-based infrastructure for the AMI networks which can enhance the reliability of the network and reduce network latency. In the proposed method, we have proposed a new method in which a dynamic aggregator is assigned to each smart meter, and, in addition, an appropriate routing algorithm is proposed in order to ensure the timely and reliable transmission of smart meter data to MDMS. The bandwidth required for each flow will be reserved in all links along the path. This approach increases the reliability of AMI network and satisfies the flow requirements such as bandwidth and delay. The simulation results show that proposed infrastructure significantly improves the AMI reliability and reduces the sensitivity to aggregator down.