An efficient ARP for large-scale IEEE 802.11s-based smart grid networks

Abstract

Recently, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been touted as one of the suitable communication infrastructure for Smart Grid (SG) Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) applications due to their ease of deployment and reasonable costs. These WMNs are typically based on the upcoming IEEE standard, namely IEEE 802.11s. However, 802.11s has performance related issues regarding scalability. One of the inefficiencies is related to the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) when creating and maintaining the ARP cache and issuing path discovery within large-scale networks. In this paper, we propose an efficient ARP scheme for large-scale AMI networks. Specifically, we utilize the proactive Path Request (PREQ) message of 802.11s standard to perform the MAC address resolution during routing tree creation and maintenance and hence eliminate the broadcasting of ARP requests. Simulation results with the implementation of 802.11s in Network Simulator 3 (NS-3) show that compared to the original broadcast operations our approach improves the packet delivery ratio and throughput significantly. © 2013 IEEE.