Routing and Reliability Improvements in WM-Bus protocol for smart cities

In a smart city, accounting information such as gas and electricity usage is gathered by meter nodes and sent to the collector node. A trade-off between the location of meters and the best quality communication signal is often needed and difficult to achieve for urban constraints and other communication signals. Meters can have limited resources such as memories and CPU. The thesis presents two routing extensions of the WM- Bus which is an open standard protocol for smart metering systems for improved performance and routing in a dense mesh utility network. The former extension is called NARUN: Noise Adaptive Routing in Utility Net- works. In NARUN, the collector calculates the path with the least noise to reach the destination meter. A weighted network graph that shows the connections among me- ters is used, where an edge weight defines the link failure index. No control messages are used to keep the weights updated. Meters report link failure index back to the collector by means of ordinary reading messages. The latter extension is NARUN-PC: NARUN with path cache. NARUN-PC ex- tends NARUN by introducing a caching strategy in the collector node. This thesis presents models and simulations of these two extensions. Performances have been evaluated in a real-life topology where a subset of the edges is affected by different levels of noise. Results show that NARUN has the lowest failure rate and traffic compared to the DSR protocol when the noise power is higher than -73 dBm. NARUN-PC decreases the traffic load and failure rate with respect to NARUN when the noise power is higher than -73 dBm.