Performance Assessment of Distributed Communication Architectures in Smart Grid

The huge amount of smart meters and growing frequent data readings have become a big challenge on data acquisition and processing in smart grid advanced metering infrastructure systems. This requires a distributed communication architecture in which multiple distributed meter data management systems (MDMSs) are deployed and meter data are processed locally. In this paper, we present the network model for supporting this distributed communication architecture and propose to use large-scale antenna array at the distributed MDMSs to further improve communication performance. We provide performance assessment for this architecture in terms of system throughput and cost efficiency. Specifically, we derive a closed-form asymptotic approximation to the system throughput, which exhibits a very good accuracy compared with simulation results. Based on this tight approximation, we have defined cost efficiency, which takes the deployment cost of distributed MDMSs into account. Our results demonstrate the significant advantages of the distributed architecture over the transitional centralized one in terms of communication performance and scalability. By carefully selecting the number of distributed MDMSs, the distributed communication architecture is also cost efficient.