Design and analysis of a wireless monitoring network for transmission lines in smart grid

In order to timely and precisely locate a problem over the power lines, the control center needs to monitor the status of the transmissionlines and the towers. In this paper, we design such a monitoring network by taking advantage of the existing optical fiber composite overhead ground wire OPGW alongside the transmission lines. Because it is not cost-effective to have gateway access to the OPGW for every transmission tower, we propose to deploy a multi-hop wireless sensor network in between two sparsely deployed neighboring OPGW gateways. We mainly study the power allocation for the data transmission of the wireless sensors because of the assumption that such sensors are powered by green energy and a battery with limited capacity for easy deployment and maintenance. Specifically, we propose several centralized schemes with different objectives, for example, the minimum power usage and fast computation. We also propose a distributed scheme so that the sensors can be even more energy efficient dealing with dynamic traffic in field operations. Moreover, we analyze the centralized schemes to study their pros and cons. We also conduct a case study for the distributed scheme to demonstrate its feasibility in field operations. Copyright © 2015John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.