A minimum physical distance delivery protocol based on ZigBee in smart grid

ZigBee provides a simple and reliable solution for the advanced measuring infrastructures. However, the current routing algorithms cannot fully satisfy the requirements of the application, and the characteristics of the node deployment and the data flows should be more considered. In this paper, we propose a minimum physical distance (MPD) delivery protocol based on the ZigBee specification in the smart grid to optimize the transmission of the monitoring and command packets which are from or to the ZigBee coordinator (ZC). The physical depth, which is introduced to indicate the least hops to the ZC, and the transmission paths are decided based on the neighbour table information. The simulation results show that the MPD could improve the performance of the monitoring and controlling packet transmission, it provided high reliability and short paths, the bits sent by the devices except the coordinator were reduced and the end-to-end delay was also shortened.