The impact of scalable routing on lifetime of smart grid communication networks

The paradigm of sensors organized in a multi-hop wireless network has been recognized as a cost effective way to satisfy the real-time sensing and communication needs of a smart grid. For wireless sensor networks, one of the most important design goals is the maximization of network lifetime. Scalability, on the other hand, is also of utmost importance for any given network design problem and especially in a wide area smart grid deployment scenario. Improving scalability requires the network flows to be more localized, however, localizing network operations works against the utilization of some optimal paths required for load balancing and lifetime prolonging. Therefore, lifetime maximization and scalability are two design criteria acting against each other. In this study, a characterization of achievable network lifetime as a function of level of localization of the routing operations under optimal conditions is performed using three localized routing approaches. We build a novel Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) framework with a special emphasis on the details of energy dissipation terms in sensor nodes to model the network behavior correctly. Numerical analysis performed using the developed MIP framework enables us to quantify the impact of different levels of route localization on network lifetime.