A Smart Meter Firmware Update Strategy Through Network Coding for AMI Network

Abstract

With the introduction of communication infrastructure into the traditional power grids, smart power grids are emerging to meet the future electricity demands. In smart grid, advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is one of the main components that enables bi-directional communication between home area networks and utility providers. In an AMI network, one of the crucial operations is to update the firmware of the smart meters. In this paper, we propose a new forwarding strategy for the firmware updates in AMI network. Our simulation results show that the completion time of the smart meter firmware update process can be reduced significantly by using the proposed new strategy.