The power grid is going towards great evolution which is called smart grids(SG). It provides many other functions in addition to measure energy consumption like energy management, reliability and security with the help of different devices.AMI(advanced metering infrastructure) is an integral part of SG for two-way communication and structured in such a way that position of its nodes are fixed. Nodes used in AMI have limited power and resources and are energy constrained therefore they are considered as low power and lossynetworks(LLNS). Routing between these nodes is a major concern and our research issue. Simulation is done in COOJA in order to observe the performance of routing protocol for low power and lossy network (RPL) for AMI networks. RPL performance for medium and high density network has been simulated for two different objective functions(OF) and analyze different performance parameters. After simulation we have concluded that considering the quality, low latency and high reliability factors minimum rank with hysteresis objective function(MRHOF) gives better results as compare to objective function zero(OF0) in medium density networks. In high density network (above 100 nodes) OF0 outrun MRHOF in terms of packet delivery ratio(PDR). Average value of PDR for OF0(in high density network) is 2%to 6% higher as compare to MRHOF.COOJA simulation provide reasonable results for RPL nodes in high density networks. But due to load balancing and selection of unreliable links RPL nodes in large scale network suffers from performance degradation.

SG is the application of energy grids to manage delivery, generation and usage of electricity. AMI is a part of SG which supports two-way communication between SM at user end to meter data management system.SG play an important role to limit electricity wastage by giving timely information to user. Communication infrastructure designing and planning of AMI is a hot research topic in academics and in industrial scale. AMI applications in SG require proper routing, low latency and a high reliability. Routing protocol used for its application must have fast routing and is capable of frequent link changes. RPL is recommended for AMI networks. In which OF is responsible for affecting the performance of routing. Therefore, selection of OF is an important part for improving the performance of SG. RPL protocol is influenced by many challenges like network size, energy consumption, latency etc. RPL routing performance in SG has been discussed extensively in many papers. The work presented in this paper is different from the others because it mainly focuses on AMI SG network scenario by considering different parameters and topologies using RPL routing.OF evaluation is already done in paper. But in our paper we have not only modified the basic Internet of things(IOT) network scenario but also analyzed PDR and network latency by increasing number of nodes for SG AMI application.

AMI is a bi directional communication architecture between smart meters and city utilities. It facilitates the user to give timely information about the energy usage, outage, demand side management, and power theft or meter tempering. The main structure designed for the AMI network consists of one dataconcreator, which acts as a gateway between the gathered information from SMs at home’s and the utilities companies. Recently RPL routing protocol is selected for AMI networks, but it comes with some short comings like instability packet loss due to high traffic and selection of sub optimal path. In order to fulfill the requirements of low latency and high reliability in AMI networks, RPL protocol must have fast routing and capable of withstand frequent link changes. RPL protocol is the most preferable routing protocol of IPV6 for large scale networks.AMI facilitate two-way communication to get an intelligent grid. It consists of different technologies like smart meters, meter data management system, communication networks.

RPL protocol has diverse applications in industrial, agricultural, home automation and in smart grid networks. Routing between SM and data concentrator is a crucial part in SG performance. AMI networks are sensitive to changes and has limited capacity which make them LLN. In a SG network smart meters are nodes which route data to the data concentrator. In a smart grid networks packets are route towards destination by considering the best and optimal path. In a lossy medium routing performance is inversely proportional to number of hopes. High number of hopes degrades network performance and induce delay in a system. To increase routing performance in a SG number of hops should be limited which is achieved by choosing a shortest path. Optimal path is achieved by not only consider shortest path but also consider ETX matric in IOT enabled networks.LLN ’ s always comes with energy consumption problems especially in large case scenario. This issue occurs because current node distance from sink node increases. Bottleneck is the major problem in large scale network resulting in reliability problems. Energy balancing and maintain quality of service is the major task in large case scenario.Results show that RPL under dense network in grid topology has better PDR in case of OF0 as compare to MRHOF. Results show that OF0 experiences higher latency as compare to MRHOF. When network size increases number of hops increases.From our results we have summarized the following conclusions.

In our research work we have used RPL protocol and test it under different network scenario in order to observe its feasibility in SG AMI networks. AMI networks in SG application need high reliability and low latency. RPL protocol provide these requirements by selecting suitable objective function. We have studied different performance parameters by changing different OF. We came to know that MRHOF outrun OF0 as it has high reliability and low latency but it consumes more power than OF0.Performance evaluation of RPL in a dense network revealed that while using OF0 PDR is better than MRHOF. COOJA met all the requirement of routing and provide control over simulation. From our findings we came to know that network scale and density of flows have appreciable impact on the network performance. In future our goal is to enhance and add configuration in basic RPL parameters to participate well in SG applications.

Regards,
Alisha
Journal Coordinator
American Journal of Computer Science & Information Technology