Coexistence of Smart Utility Networks and WLANs in Smart Grid Systems

This paper aims to analyze coexistence performance and study the impact of WLAN interferences on SUNs. To quantitatively reveal packet error rate (PER) performance of SUNs under multiple WLAN interferers, a segmentation scheme for desired data packet with multiple interferers is developed, based on which a packet collision model in a multi-interferer environment is proposed. The new packet collision model captures interference scenarios in every time segment of a desired packet using the proposed segmentation scheme. It paves a way to make a precise estimation of the PER of SUNs under multiple WLAN interferers. Furthermore, we design a channel agility scheme for coexistence of SUNs and WLANs via improving the existing ones, and analyze its performance in interference identification and avoidance. The proposed scheme performs interference detection for every data packet, and thus, an SUN is able to avoid WLANs interferences in a timely manner.