NARUN-PC: Caching Strategy for Noise Adaptive Routing in Utility Networks

In a smart meter network, accounting information are gathered from meters and sent to a collector node. In smart cities, a trade-off between the location of meters and the best quality communication signal is often difficult to achieve for urban restrictions and other transmitted signals. Meters can also be constrained in terms of memory and CPU. This paper proposes NARUN with Path Cache (NARUN-PC), an extension of the Noise Adaptive Routing for Utility Networks (NARUN) for improved performance and routing in a dense mesh utility network. 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 meters is used, where an edge weight defines the corresponding link failure index ranging from one (the link admits no noise) to infinite (the link is broken). 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. NARUN-PC introduces a caching strategy in NARUN. NARUN-PC can use a previously cached routing path instead of always selecting the best path. NARUN-PC improves NARUN performance in terms of message overhead, failure rate and reading rate.