Today no one can deny the need for Smart Grid and it is being considered as of utmost importance to upgrade outdated electric infrastructure to cope with the ever increasing electric load demand. Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is considered a promising candidate for internetworking of smart meters with the gateway using mesh topology. This paper investigates the performance of AODV routing protocol for WSN based smart metering deployment. Three case studies are presented to analyze its performance based on four metrics of (i) Packet Delivery Ratio, (ii) Average Energy Consumption of Nodes (iii) Average End-End Delay and (iv) Normalized Routing Load. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.