A critical component of the smart grid (SG) infrastructure is the embedded communications network, where an important objective of the latter is the expansion of its throughput, in conjunction with the satisfaction of specified latency and accuracy requirements. For the effective design of the communications network, the user and traffic profiles, such as known-user vs. unknown-user populations and bursty vs. non-bursty data traffics, must be carefully considered and subsequently modeled. This paper relates user and traffic models to the deployment of effective multiple access transmission algorithms in the communications network of the SG.