Interference-aware QoS multicast routing for smart grid

In the smart grid Wide Area Control Systems (WACS), controller sends command & control message (C & C) messages to remote devices. The reliability and stability of WACS heavily depends on whether the remote devices react promptly. In other words, the end-to-end transmission delay of the C & C messages plays a significant role in ensuring the performance of WACS. Multihop wireless mesh networks are considered as suitable networking infrastructure for providing data communication in smart grid. Nevertheless, due to the interference nature of wireless networks, identifying paths with minimum end-to-end delay is not trivial. This paper deals with the issue of identifying the multicast tree with minimum end-to-end transmission delay for multicasting a C & C message from the controller to a set of remote devices. Our proposal particularly considers the specific communication requirement from smart grid. The contributions of this paper are: (1) we formulate the problem of calculating multicast tree delay as an integer linear programming; (2) we propose a delay estimation method; (3) we propose a new routing algorithm to identify a multicast tree with the minimum delay. Through extensive numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed routing algorithm outperforms the existing multicast tree routing algorithm.