dc.description.abstract | With the rapid increase in deployment of smart meters across North America, resource
consumption data of utilities such as water, gas and electricity is being collected at a much higher
granular level. The huge amount of data is being used to make demand-response applications
smarter. A large part of this deployment of smart utility networks and Advanced Metering
Infrastructure (AMI) is being done using wireless mesh architecture due to the low deployment
costs offered by this method. Although wireless environment parameters such as fading and path
loss differ widely from home, outdoor to industrial, in-building scenarios, efficient protocols at the
Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical (PHY) layers and lower layer agnostic data routing
protocols can be employed to overcome these challenges. For such routing protocols to be
applicable to smart utility networks, reliability, scalability and security are vital metrics which will
determine their performance in such networks.
Our objective in this dissertation is to present a Reliability, Scalability and Security (RSSSUN)
suite of recommended protocols most applicable for Smart Utility Networks. We present
the performance analysis of wireless mesh routing protocols most applicable to smart utility
networks. New and emerging routing protocols being proposed as an alternate standard by the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) community have been chosen for performance
comparison. Herein, we analyze the reliability of three routing protocols, viz. RPL (IPv6 Routing
Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks), LOAD (6LoWPAN Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance
Vector Routing) and a proprietary flavor of Geographical Routing developed by Landis+Gyr.
Routing metrics of packet success probability, end-end delay, hop count, link quality and
packet delivery ratio have been considered for this performance analysis. Further, realistic network
topologies, obtained from actual smart meter network deployments in North America have been
modeled in simulations to derive at results pertinent to the applicability of these wireless mesh
routing protocols to Advanced Metering Infrastructure comprising of smart utility networks.With respect to scalability, we address the issue of scalable routing protocols being vital to
its successful deployment in smart utility networks. To that effect, we present two approaches to
modeling the wireless mesh network with the goal of analyzing the scalability of routing protocols
in such networks with respect to large scale deployment.
Approach I models the network as being connected with a Poisson distribution with density
and transmission range as parameters. We quantify an upper bound to the network size at a
maximum total expected successful packet transmission as determined by the packet success
probability of each link. We validate these results with simulation data from a large scale network
using the supercomputer infrastructure at the Alabama Supercomputing Authority located in
Huntsville, AL.
In Approach II, we model the wireless mesh network traffic arrival process as a Markov
Modulated Poisson Process (MMPP) with two distinct modes. Further, an MMPP(2)/M/1/N
queuing model is analyzed with the same goal of finding a network size upper bound, such that
stability is maintained in the network. Verification of the model with analytical and simulation
data is presented with conclusive scalability bounds affecting performance
With respect to Security, we present the urgent need to implement state-of-the-art
cryptographic schemes to devices in smart utility networks. Further, we entail the security risks
and possible mitigation practices. Two popular industry adopted public-key cryptographic
schemes of RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) are compared
for performance on the Tmote-Sky hardware platform. We present the impact and trade-offs
involved in implementing security, an indispensable requirement in smart utility networks. | en_US |