Efficient strategy to optimize key devices positions in large-scale RF mesh networks

RF Mesh technology is currently one of the most used in North America for smart grid communications where reputable companies such as Itron and Landys&Gyr are setting up their smart meters with RF Mesh radios. The overall performance of radio frequency (RF) Mesh network communications depends in high measure on the positions of key devices in RF Mesh network such as routers and collectors. With this in mind, we have designed a strategy to optimize jointly the positions of the key devices of RF Mesh network such as routers and collectors to achieve the highest possible connectivity between different components of RF Mesh network. Furthermore, for a big amount of meters, the proposed strategy process becomes unfeasible in terms of processing time. For that, we have applied an optimized prepartitioning methodology on the proposed strategy that leads to vastly accelerate our proposed strategy to more than 13 times for Montreal dataset with a negligible effect on quality of service (QoS) parameters. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.