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Real-time transmission of smart meter measurement data is investigated. A contention based approach exploiting the unused cellular spectrum, e.g. of 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE), is proposed. The proposed approach uses subsets of LTE resource blocks (RBs) as allocation units. It is based on channel aware reservation slotted Aloha over orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) using time/frequency slots, which leads to a reduction of collision probability, prevents collisions in the transmission phase, and allows detecting these collisions at the reservation phase.

The proposed method relies on an access point (AP) that indicates the “available” OFDMA subcarriers to the contending devices after receiving this information through coordination with the cellular base station (BS): The BS informs the AP of the LTE RBs that it intends to keep free for a certain time period (e.g., because the current load …