A survey of routing protocols for smart grid communications

With the recent initiatives to upgrade the existing power grid to the Smart Grid (SG), there has been a significant interest in the design and development of an efficient communications infrastructure for connecting different components of the SG. In addition to the currently used underlying networks and protocols, new wired/wireless approaches are being planned for deployment for different components/applications of the SG. Based on the data requirements of the applications, new challenges have arisen at the network layer of the protocol stack with respect to routing and data forwarding. In this paper, we focus on the routing issues in the SG communications infrastructure which consists of different network components, such as Home Area Networks (HANs), Neighborhood Area Networks (NANs) and Wide Area Networks (WANs). We provide a comprehensive survey of the existing routing research and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed protocols with respect different applications areas. We also identify the future research issues that are yet to be addressed with respect to the applications and network components. This survey is the first to identify routing design issues for the SG and categorize the proposed routing protocols from the SG applications perspective. We believe that this work will be valuable for the utilities and other energy companies whose target is to develop and deploy a specific SG application that may span different network components. In addition, this work will provide valuable insights for the newcomers who would like to pursue routing related research in the SG domain.