Efficient and Reliable Communication of Beidou Short Message in Smart Grid

Communication infrastructure is an essential part to the success of the emerging smart grid. Various communication technologies, such as EPON, PLC, Industrial Ethernet and GPRS/CDMA, have been widely used, which cannot adapt to remote mountain communities and natural disaster areas suffering earthquake, flood and so on. The unique short message subsystem of Beidou satellite navigation system provides a feasible solution to the above-mentioned problem. Unfortunately, there are some resource limitations about Beidou short message, i.e. limited capacity, limited frequency and unreliable transfer. The Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) mechanism preserves reliability by resending the lost packets, which leads to performances degradation of goodput and delay. Whats worse, the transmission will be interrupted under communication constraints. To solve this issue, this paper presents an Adaptive Hybrid Error Correction (AHEC) protocol, which combines the advantages of Selective ARQ and Front Error Correction (FEC). Since the degree of redundancy injected into the coding is adjusted with the feedback information, namely, decreasing when the network is well-behaved and increasing when it is not, transmission performance using AHEC protocol can be obviously improved. The experimental results show that our methodology can increase the goodput significantly and the performance of AHEC protocol is 21.11% higher than the typical ARQ protocol in the case of 20% packet loss.