A reliable opportunistic routing for smart grid with in-home power line communication networks

The topology of in-home power line communication (PLC) networks varies frequently, which makes traditional routing algorithms failure. To solve this problem, an end-to-end transmission time for remaining path (TTRP) metric-based opportunistic routing (TTRPOR) is proposed. Since a local broadcasting scheme is adopted, the algorithm can find the optimal path for forwarding packets in a dynamic PLC network. The closed-form of the outage probability for a PLC channel is derived to estimate the TTRP. It is proved that the average throughput can achieve maximum as the metric TTRP is utilized to sort candidate forwarding nodes. Numerical results show that the end-to-end throughput of networks with TTRPOR, outperforms that of the network adopting DSR and EXOR, especially for the case of varying-topology in-home PLC networks.