Only two types of sleep cycles with two fixed sleep periods are defined in the standard of the discontinuous reception (DRX) mechanism in LTE/LTE-A. Explicitly, such a DRX mechanism is simple but lacks flexibility. To provide flexibility, two types of dynamic and adjustable DRX (DADRX) mechanisms are proposed and investigated in this paper. The first type of DADRX extends the number of types of sleep cycles through adding different pairs of sleep cycles with different sleep periods gradually. As for the second type of DADRX, it fixes the total number of types of sleep cycles like the first-type DADRX but further employs a set of level expanding probabilities to control probabilistically the possible pairs of sleep cycles that can be reached. To enable the analytical calculation, performance metrics for the proposed DADRX mechanisms are acquired, including average response delay and average long-term power consumption. Via both analytical and simulation approaches, we investigate the dynamics of performance for the proposed DADRX mechanisms extensively. We successfully show that these two proposed mechanisms can exhibit much more flexibility than the closely related mechanisms in the literature.

Abstract Smart grid technology has attracted a lot of attention in the communication and power engineering communities because of its high efficiency and environmental friendly power production and delivery. Smart grid communication networks act as not only a bridge between the end power users and the utility but also a backbone of the entire smart grid system. It is a challenging task to deploy smart grid communication networks because of interference‐intensive environment. The goal of this paper is to explore various issues on deployment of smart grid communication networks. The first half of this paper provides a survey on smart grid communication networks. The background of smart grid communication networks is introduced, and the IEEE 802.15.4g standard for smart utility networks is reviewed. In addition, the issues on network topology and routing protocols of smart utility networks are addressed, followed by the discussions on optimizing gateway deployment. Various methods for addressing coexistence issues in smart grid communication networks are presented. The second half of this paper is to propose a channel discovery algorithm exploiting the inherent CSMA/CA mechanism in the protocols. Because of the use of CSMA/CA mechanism and up‐to‐date channel status table, the proposed algorithm can quickly find an available channel for transmission when interferences occur. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.