WiMAX Models for the Smart Grid

Abstract

The smart grid is the integration of the 21st century information and communications technologies with the 20th century traditional power grid. Such integration empowers the electricity utilities and their consumers to play an interactive role to better manage and operate their power consumptions and integrates their renewable energy resources to the grid. As wireless communication is evolving, it is expected that WiMAX will play a major role in the data and commands exchange between generation, transmission, distribution and consumption control and dispatch centers. This thesis proposes the design of two WiMAX network topologies to serve as a wireless communication network for the smart grid. Based on the smart grid applications' quality of service requirements, network parameters and scheduling, simulation models were developed. The traffic was classified into five priority classes. Three scheduling algorithms namely; class-based weighted fair, class-based deficit weighted round-robin and class-based strict priority scheduling were used to simulate and assess the performance of the proposed models. Simulation results showed that the class-based strict priority queuing is better for the highest priority classes and the class-based weighted fair queuing preserved the quality of service requirements for all classes.