Performance Evaluation of Large-scale RF-Mesh Networks in a Smart City Context

Driven by the need of robust, cost-effective, and ready-to-use solutions to connect wirelessly thousands to million of nodes, an increasing number of applications such as Smart Grids and IoT networks use large-scale Wireless Mesh Networks as transmission support. Tools and methodologies to study the performance of such systems are constantly sought and become fundamental in the feasibility assessment of the high number of possible applications. In this paper, a simulation tool is proposed to study the performance of a particular kind of Wireless Mesh Network, based on the RF-Mesh technology. The modular nature of the implemented tool allows for a smooth extension to the performance analysis of other types of Wireless Mesh Networks using technologies similar to RF-Mesh. The tool was implemented in the context of a large-scale Smart Grid AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) system. The tool, coded in Java and Python, considers different types of traffic and provides the end-to-end delay and several other performance indexes of large scale (i.e., with several thousand nodes) instances in the order of minutes. A realistic large-scale case study of a smart city is also presented to assess the suitability of the RF-Mesh technology for some IoT and smart city applications, that do not require a very small delay.