Performance assessment of distributed communication architectures in smart grid.

摘要

The huge amount of smart meters and growingudfrequent data readings have become a big challenge on dataudacquisition and processing in smart grid advanced meteringudinfrastructure systems. This requires a distributedudcommunication architecture in which multiple distributed meteruddata management systems (MDMSs) are deployed and meteruddata are processed locally. In this paper, we present the networkudmodel for supporting this distributed communicationudarchitecture and propose to use large-scale antenna array at theuddistributed MDMSs to further improve communicationudperformance. We provide performance assessment for thisudarchitecture in terms of system throughput and cost efficiency.udSpecifically, we derive a closed-form asymptotic approximationudto the system throughput, which exhibits a very good accuracyudcompared with simulation results. Based on this tightudapproximation, we have defined cost efficiency, which takes theuddeployment cost of distributed MDMSs into account. Our resultsuddemonstrate the significant advantages of the distributedudarchitecture over the transitional centralized one in terms ofudcommunication performance and scalability. By carefullyudselecting the number of distributed MDMSs, the distributedudcommunication architecture is also cost efficient.