Student Presentations: June 8, 2011
Communications for Residential Smart-Grid
Yiannis Yiakoumis
Smart Grid promises bidirectional flow of information and
energy over a combined electric power, information, and communication
infrastructure. As part of it, residential areas overcome signi cant
changes : roof-mounted solar cells contribute energy to the grid, AMI
infrastructure provides the means for accurate, real-time monitoring
and dynamic pricing, electric vehicles introduce a heavy load to home
energy consumption, and smarter appliances might autoadapt to varying
conditions in the grid. While the excitement is high, it's still not
clear how the smart-grid ecosystem will evolve. To allow innovation
and continuous evolution, the communication infrastructure should be
able to accomodate interaction between utilities, users, appliance
vendors, and other third party companies. One of the evolving trends
in the electricity industry is the deployment of a dedicated
communications infrastructure to reach the home area, namely the Home
Area Network. Currently limited to the collection of metering data,
one would expect this to be extended for other services like dynamic
pricing, and demand-response. We believe that there are two main
drawbacks related to this approach:
CAPEX/OPEX : Deploying, maintaining, and operating such a net-
working infrastructure is hard and expensive.
Integration : Contrary to the rest of the grid where a utility company
fully plans, controls and operates the infrastructure, the residential area
poses the challenge of multiple owners and operators (e.g. user, utility,
third-party providers, appliances).
Driven by cost reduction and openness/interoperability, we want to
explore the use of existing broadband home networks as an alternative
approach. Penetration of broadband networks is high, and will keep
improving. Sharing costs and efforts with ISPs will reduce the overall
expenses and speed-up deployment of smart-grid technologies. Besides,
the home network can be the "interconnection substrate" between
providers, manufacturers, and users : a utility company meters
consumption and advertises prices; the user monitors usage through a
cloud-based monitoring tool; and an electric appliance auto-configures
itself to operate over low-rate timeslots. We propose the systematic
study of such an approach. This will include cost analysis, evaluation
of communication patterns expected in residential areas, and the
development of a prototype where we can show this architecture
deployed on a realistic home environment. Several challenges need to
be addressed :
Infrastructure Sharing : The network infrastructure to and within the
home (last-mile, LAN) should be sharable among multiple providers (e.g.
ISP, utility company). This implies isolation in terms of resources (e.g.
bandwidth) and data (network traffic). The infrastructure itself should be
sufficiently reliable and malicious/misbehaving users/applications should
not a ect smart-grid related communications.
Network protocols : Appropriate network protocols should be used
based on application needs. While transferring compressed measurement
data could take place over a standard TCP connection, QoS, VPN, IPsec,
might be necessary for low latency, security etc. Understanding appli-
cation characteristics and applying appropriate techniques is important
to avoid common misconceptions (e.g. IP cannot provide gurantees) and
highlight the major difficulties. Auto-configuration and discovery mecha-
nisms (e.g. UPnP) should be explored to facilitate integration of different
devices.
Security and Privacy : An open network poses security threats. In
order for a utility company to trust critical operations over a shared
infrastructure (e.g. accounting and billing, demand-response), the
underlying network substrate should enable sufficient policies to
prevent such threats. For example, everybody should be able to read
current pricing information; but billing data must be tamper-proof and
only the utility company should be able to upgrade the firmware on
smart-meters.
Towards this goal, we highly value collaboration with and feedback
from vested parties (e.g. utilities, ISPs, appliance manufacturers).
Presentation Charts
Presentation Charts in PDF