Latency and Bandwidth Analysis of LTE for a Smart Grid

Abstract: Smart grid has been proposed as an alternative to the traditional electricity grid recently thanks to its advantages of real time control on consumption demands. The latest wireless network, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE), is considered to be a promising solution to interconnecting the smart objects in a smart grid because LTE provides both low latency and large bandwidth. However, the theories and standards for deploying a smart grid are still under study. Furthermore, the performance of LTE network depends on the user devices’ conditions as well as the network service operators. Therefore it is important to analyze the performance of LTE network experimentally. In this master thesis report, the specific requirements in terms of latency and bandwidth were first determined for a hypothetical smart microgrid which consists of several key components, such as one substation/distributed generation, Phasor Measurements Units (PMU) and Advanced Meter Infrastructures (AMI). Then the latency and the peak data rats of the LTE networks provided by two service operators TELE2 and TELIA were investigated and compared. The experimental results show that both latency and peak data rate of the LTE network provided by TELE2 fulfil the requirements for the smart microgrid, while the LTE network provided by TELIA gives a little longer latency. In addition, the simulation results based on a proposed scheduler indicate that the latency can be improved by an appropriate scheduler. This study has proven that LTE network is a promising solution for smart grids.