Optimum number of aggregators based on power consumption, cost, and network lifetime in advanced metering infrastructure architecture for Smart Grid Internet of Things

Internet of Things connects anythings at any time in any places. Smart grid is one of the promising applications of Internet of Things. Advanced metering infrastructure is one of the most important components of smart grid which aggregates data from smart meters and sends the collected data to the utility center to be analyzed and stored. In this paper, we have proposed an aggregation-based indirect architecture for advanced metering infrastructure architecture in smart grid Internet of Things and focused on finding the optimum number of regional aggregators in its neighborhood area network (NAN) based on three metrics: regional aggregator (RA) power consumption, cost of RAs and wide-area aggregator, and NAN lifetime. We have developed a power consumption model for each RA and define NAN lifetime based on that. We also defined a new performance metric, the product of power consumption and cost (PC), so that by minimizing it, we can obtain the optimum number of RAs. The simulation results indicate correctness of our theoretical model and show that we can achieve a balance between NAN lifetime and RAs' cost.