A Genetic QoS-Aware Routing Protocol for the Smart Electricity Networks

This paper presents a QoS-aware routing protocol suitable for distribution of smart electricity grids based on heterogeneous machine to machine communications. The distribution Smart Grid needs high performance communication networks capable of handling QoS, an issue that is addressed by the present paper. The proposed algorithm is a merger between a genetic algorithm (GA) and Ticket-Based Routing (TBR), which is an on-demand routing protocol for ad hoc networks that provide quality of service. A suitable parameterization of the GA parameters is needed in order to use this protocol in the coming Smart Grid networks. The resulting routing protocol, named genetic algorithm with TBR algorithm for Smart Grids (GATAS), is an adapted intelligent evolution of the TBR. The performance of TBR has been improved by reducing the overhead of routing packets in the network and by minimizing the communication latency due to its on-demand behavior. Experimental evidence indicates that the likelihood of finding the optimum route using multiobjective dynamic metrics increases when the genetic algorithm is applied. In this paper, the main simulation results on the parameterization carried out are discussed, and the proposed attributes of the GA are described.