Energy-Efficient Smart Metering for Green Smart Grid Communication

In a smart grid, smart meters are expected to be the key technology to support bi-directional information exchange between service providers and end-users. The on-growing demand of smart meters (residential customers and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles) would result in huge energy consumption, while communicating with the entities in the smart grid. Therefore, green wireless communication technologies are expected to help in reducing their impact on environment. Therefore, it is important to design energy-efficient schemes that can reduce CO2 emissions and cost-effective energy management in the smart grid. In this paper, an energy-efficient smart metering scheme is proposed - an effort towards minimizing the energy consumption by the smart meters for green smart grid communication. We incorporate the use of coalition game to form multiple coalitions among smart meters to communicate with the service provider. We show that there exists a stable condition of the coalitions for which the payoff values of the smart meters are maximized. The simulation results show that using the proposed approach, energy consumption by the smart meters can be reduced, which, in turn, would enable green wireless communication in the smart grid.