Optimal Placement of Cellular Transceiver for Transmission Line Monitoring Using Genetic Algorithm

In recent decades, automation and modernization inhabit a vital role in the electric power industry. For reliable operation, the transmission network has to be continuously monitored and smarter decisions could be executed to satisfy the real time needs. In this respect, electrical transmission towers are installed with wireless sensor network (WSN) to gather the information from the transmission line network. The collected information is transmitted to the control centre for further actions through hybrid hierarchical network architecture. The hybrid architecture consists of a combination of wired, wireless and cellular technologies. WSNs are facing the bottleneck problem during transmission of data due to the bandwidth and latency of low data rate devices. Installation of cellular transceiver in transmission towers can reduce bottleneck problems remarkably. Whereas the installation of cellular transceivers cause high cost. Hence, this paper explains the optimistic ways for optimal placement of cellular transceivers with minimum cost. The objective is to define cellular node locations in order to improve network performance in terms of bandwidth and end-to-end delay. To attain the cost optimistic location of cellular transceivers, a heuristic algorithm based on genetic strategy is developed and applied to a benchmark set of problems. Experiments by simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in this paper. Model solutions specify both where to place the cellular transceivers and the optimal data paths to route the data. The optimization problem is carried with the objective of minimizing the installation cost. Through a comprehensive evaluation in simulation we show that our approach is effective in accomplishing the desired objectives for corridor of several hundreds of towers.