Vertex Coloring based Slot Reuse Scheduling for Power Line Communications

Abstract

-Power line communication (PLC) is one of the major communication technologies in smart grid since it combines good communication capability with easy and simple deployment. As a power network can be modeled as a graph, we propose a vertex coloring based slot reuse scheduling in the time division multiple access (TDMA) period for PLCs. Our objective is to minimize the number of assigned time slots, while satisfying the quality of service (QoS) requirement of each station. Since the scheduling problem is NP-hard, we propose an efficient heuristic scheduling, which consists of repeated vertex coloring and slot reuse improvement algorithms. The simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the total number of time slots.