New schemes of both networking and routing for the high-speed narrowband power line communication (HNPLC) are proposed to meet the demand of bidirectional interaction in the smart grid. The networking scheme is implemented with Mesh topology adopting low cost of timing and signaling overhead by the cross-layer consideration. A distributed on-demand routing protocol with the function of bidirectional interaction is provided to minimize the integrate cost. Performance of the proposed networking and routing is evaluated in a practical HNPLC network. The simulated results show that the proposed routing scheme outperforms the traditional schemes in terms of faster network rate

better load balance and higher transmission success rate. Mesh based networking has more advantages than the tree and artificial cobweb based networking in the bidirectional and interactive HNPLC network. This work is supported by State Grid Corporation of China (No. 20152000219).