In this paper, we present a multi-gate mesh network architecture that has been developed to ensure high performance and reliability under emergency conditions when a system expects to receive power outage notifications and exchanges. In order to handle the metering traffic, under time varying outage conditions we introduce a multi-gate and single-class back-pressure based scheduling algorithm, which takes into account both the hop-count, as well as the queue length of each mesh node. An important requirement of this algorithm is that all the meter nodes should always maintain a separate path to each gateway. We first quantify the stability region of the network when our novel algorithm is applied to schedule the packets. We then present a numeric analysis to prove that the overall network delay is reduced as a result of employing the proposed scheduling algorithm. Moreover, we also theoretically prove that the network is always able to remain stable as long as the arrival rate vector lies inside the stability region provided by our scheduling algorithm. Finally, we derive a distributed objective function that is adopted by the practical implementation of the packet-scheduling scheme. The simulation results indicate that under the context of the multi-gate network, our packet-scheduling scheme can indeed significantly improve the network's reliability and delay performance, which are important factors under outage conditions.
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