The Internet of Things (IoT) has recently emerged as enabling technology for the smart gird, smart health, smart transportation, and smart environment as well as for smart cities. The major smart grid devices are smart home appliances, distributed renewable energy resources and power substations. The seven domains existing smart grid conceptual model was developed without the IoT concept in mind. As the smart grid evolved, many attempts started to introduce the IoT as enabling technology to the grid. Each device in the grid can be considered as an object. Utilizing the concept of IoT, each device can have a unique IP address that can upload its status and download control commands via the Internet. This paper proposes a conceptual model for the smart grid within the Internet of Things context. The proposed model is based on IPV6 as the backbone of the smart grid communications layer.
Smart Grid Smart Homes Internet of Things 6 Low PAN Conceptual Model1. Introduction
The smart gird is the integration of the 20th century traditional electrical power grid with the most recent 21st telecommunication and information technologies. Such integration enables efficient resource utilization to optimize energy consumption, install and manage distributed energy sources, as well as to exchange the generated power. In other words, the power flow and communications will be in two-ways [1]-[3]. Many utility companies around the globe started to install renewable energy sources such as solar and wind energy nearby the consumption sites. Also, residential home owners started to install smart home appliances and renewable energy resources in their premises to generate and consume electrical power efficiently [4] [5].
As the smart grid concepts emerged as a fast growing research and development topic in the last few years, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed a conceptual model for the smart grid to set the stage for a better understanding to the smart grid technology. The NIST conceptual model consists of seven domains [6], namely: bulk generations, transmissions, distributions, consumers, markets, operations and service providers. Smart grid users communicate in two-way directions by utilizing several wireless and wired communication protocols such as Zigbee, WiFi, Homeplug, power line carrier, GPRS, WiMax, LET, Lease line, and Fibers [7] [8]. Several software packages were updated and many are being developed to accommodate the new grid operation, maintenance and management such as, distribution management system (DMS), geographic information systems (GIS), outage management systems (OMS), customer information systems (CIS), and supervisory control and data acquisition system (SCADA).
As a result of the smart grid evolution, some recent enabling technologies have emerged to reduce the number of communication protocols and handle big amounts of data. The Internet of Things (IoT) is one the most recent enabler for the smart grid.
This paper proposes a conceptual model for the smart grid within the IoT context.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 explores the smart grid existing communication protocols, Section 3 introduces the proposed conceptual model for the smart grid within the IoT context and Section 4 concludes the paper major contribution.
2. Smart Grid Communication Protocols
Smart grid communications are based on wireless and wired networks technologies. Regardless of the technology, these networks can be classified based on their functionality within the smart grid. These classifications, as reported in the literature, are: home area network, neighborhood area network, access network, backhaul network, core and external networks [7]. These networks connect many smart grid objects suchas home appliances, smart meters, switches, reclosers, capacitors bank, integrated electronic devices (IEDs), transformer, relays, actuators, access points, concentrators, routers, computers, printers, scanners, cameras, field testing devices, and other devices. All these appliances and devices are geographically distributed throughout the grid, starting from residential units to substations and up to utility data and command centers.
As mentioned in the introduction, each device can access and exchange data via different communication protocols. Figure 1 shows the smart grid communications protocols layers [7] [8]. The bandwidth and latency requirements for the smart grid appliances and devices vary from few msecs to several minutes and from few kbps to few hundreds kbps as shown in Table 1 [9].
3. IoT Smart Grid Conceptual Model
As mentioned in the previous sections, smart homes have several appliances and some form of renewable energy resources. These appliances and resources can be considered as IoT technologies. Each can upload and download data and commands from utilities and home owners. In addition, the grid at large has many devices that can be considered as IoT objects such as reclosers, switches, capacitor banks, transformers, IEDs, smart sensors, and actuators in the substations. In general, smart grids for large cities or countries may have millions of home appliances and thousands of grid devices.
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