A reliable QoS-aware routing scheme for neighbor area network in smart grid

A reliable bi-directional communication network is one of the key factors in smart grid (SG) to meet application requirements and improve energy efficiency. As a promising communication infrastructure, wireless mesh network (WMN) can provide high speed and cost-effect communication for SG. However, challenges remain to maintain high reliability and quality of service (QoS) when applying WMNs to SG. In this paper, we first propose a hybrid wireless mesh protocol (HWMP) based neighbor area network (NAN) QoS-aware routing scheme, named HWMP-NQ, to meet the QoS requirements by applying an integrated routing metric to route decision with effective link condition probing and queue optimization. To further improve the reliability of the proposed HWMP-NQ, we present a multi-gateway backup routing scheme along with a routing reliability correction factor to mitigate the impact of routing oscillations. Finally, we evaluate the performances of the proposed schemes on NS3 simulator. Extensive simulations demonstrate that HWMP-NQ can distinguish different applications and satisfy the QoS requirements respectively, and also improve the average packet delivery ratio and throughput with a reduced routing overhead, even with a high failure rate of mesh nodes.