Efficient Urban Coverage for Relay Aided Smart Energy Wireless Networks

Power grids deployed in every city worldwide have served relatively well in providing power supply of electricity. Nevertheless, today a new set of challenges is arising, such as the depletion of primary energy resources, the diversification of energy generation and the climate change. Traditional power grids are rapidly evolving into a new form under the name of smart grids, which encompass new technologies to meet the specific application requirements such as costs savings and energy efficiency. The key elements of this revolution are (i) the smart meters, i.e., devices which include communications and computations capabilities and are able to form a distributed network, and (ii) on purposely designed relay nodes, placed in strategic locations, to guarantee the necessary network coverage for the delivery of the report measurements to a central processing and decision unit. In this paper we propose the use of a ray tracing model for network planning, to support such an efficient coverage of relay nodes in a real urban use case. Preliminary results show accurate radio coverage estimations using different frequency bands, which has the potential to pave the way to the massive usage of smart grid networks.