RPL Routing Protocol in Smart Grid Communication

Smart grid communication emerged to solve the old grid problems. Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) network is a part of smart grid communication, organized of smart meters and concentrators. Concentrator is the gateway for a network of meters sending information in a multihop manner. Reliability and low latency are the major criteria in AMI networks which can be achieved by application configurable routing protocol. Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) defined by routing over Low power and Lossy networks (ROLL) working group is a multihop routing protocol preferred to AMI networks. Objective function specifies parent selection and route construction base on determined constraints and metrics. In this paper an Objective Function (OF) using Expected Transmission Count (ETX) as a criteria to select the parent node is evaluated with the proposed hop count based version of Objective Function 0 (OF0) using only hop count as the selection metric. Results showed that the proposed objective function performs better than the other one in case of Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and average end to end delay.