Joint sampling-communication strategies for smart-meters to aggregator link as secondary users

This paper assesses the communication between smart-meters and aggregators as secondary users that transmit their data over the primary uplink channel. We assume: directional antennas are employed in the meter-aggregator link, secondary users transmit with limited power, meters' transmissions are randomized to avoid packet collisions, and an outage constraint for the secondary links' to guarantee their robustness. Therefore, the interference caused by the secondary users in the primary can be neglected. Conversely, the secondary users still experience interference from mobile users of the primary network, whose positions and traffic activity are unknown. Our goal is to study sampling-communication strategies for transmitting the average power demand of a household so the signal can be reconstructed by the aggregator with low deviation. Our results indicate that an event-based scheme based on energy packets can outperform the usual time-based, periodic, sampling.