Joint Resource Allocation and Power Control in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks for Smart Grids

The smart grid communication plays a pivotal role in coordinating energy generation, energy transmission, and energy distribution. Cellular technology with long-term evolution (LTE)-based standards has been a preference for smart grid communication networks. However, conventional cellular networks could suffer from radio access network (RAN) congestion when many smart grid devices attempt access simultaneously. Heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets) are proposed as important techniques to solve this problem because HetNets can alleviate the RAN congestion by off-loading access attempt from a macrocell to small cells. In smart grid, real-time data from phasor measurement units (PMUs) has a stringent delay requirement in order to ensure the stability of the grid. In this paper, we propose a joint resource allocation and power control scheme to improve the end-to-end delay in HetNets by taking into account the simultaneous transmission of PMUs. We formulate the optimization problem as a mixed integer problem and adopt a game-theoretic approach and the best response dynamics algorithm to solve the problem. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly minimize the end-to-end delay compared to first-in first-out scheduling and round-robin scheduling schemes.