Cost-Efficient Residential Energy Management Scheme for Information-Centric Networking Based Home Network in Smart Grid

Abstract

Home network (HOMENET) performs multiple important functions such as energy management, multimedia sharing, lighting and climate control in smart grid (SG). In HOMENET there are numerous challenges among which mobility and security are the basic requirements that need to be addressed with priority. The information-centric networking (ICN) is regarded as the future Internet that subscribes data in a content-centric manner irrespective of its location. Furthermore, it has pecial merit in mobility and security since ICN supports in-network caching and self-contained security, these make ICN a potential solution for home communication fabric. This paper aims to apply the ICN approach on HOMENET system, which we called ICN-HOMENET. Then, a proof-of-concept evaluation is employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed ICN-HOMENET approach in data security, device mobility and efficient content distribution for developing HOMENET system in SG. In addition, we proposed a cost-efficient residential energy management (REM) scheme called ICN-REM scheme for ICN-HOMENET system which encourages consumers to shift the start time of appliances from peak hours to off-peak hours to reduce the energy bills. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose an ICN-based REM scheme for HOMENET system. In this proposal, we not only consider the conflicting requests from appliances and domestic power generation, but also think the energy management unit (EMU) should cooperate with measurement sensors to control some specific appliances in some specific conditions. Moreover, the corresponding performance evaluation validates its correctness and effectiveness.