Spectrum survey for reliable communications of cognitive radio based smart grid network

Abstract

The smart grid (SG) system is expected to involve huge amount of data with different levels of priorities to different applications or users. The traditional grid which tend to deploy propriety networks with limited coverage and bandwidth, is not sufficient to support large scale SG network. Cognitive radio (CR) is a promising communication platform for SG network by utilizing potentially all available spectrum resources, subject to interference constraint. In order to develop a reliable communication framework for CR based SG network, thorough investigations on the current radio spectrum are required. This paper presents the spectrum utilization in Malaysia, specifically in the UHF/VHF bands, cellular (GSM 900, GSM 1800 and 3G), WiMAX, ISM and LTE band. The goal is to determine the potential spectrum that can be exploit by the CR users in the SG network. Measurements was conducted for 24 hours to quantify the average spectrum usage and the amount of available bandwidth. The findings in this paper are important to provide insight of actual spectrum utilization prior to developing a reliable communication platform for CR based SG network. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.