Delay Characteristics of Responses for Demand Response Requests in Wi-Fi Home Area Networks

Abstract

NIST, in its Conceptual Model for the Smart Grid, has divided the entire Smart Grid operations into seven subdomains. The Customer Domain plays an important role in Demand Response (DR) programs. To take part in DR programs, the Customer domain should be equipped with a Home Area Network. Communications within the Home Area Network should be accomplished with the acceptable time frames of DR requests while minimizing the energy footprint of the Home Area Network itself. Therefore, it is necessary to optimize the communications with respect to delay and energy constraints. Most houses nowadays have Wi-Fi networks used for other purposes such as entertainment, and security. This paper focuses on using these existing Wi-Fi networks within houses for DR communications and study the effect of the available capacity on the mean delay of responses. This study was performed in a simulated environment with a central controller sending out requests to 25 nodes. The delay between sending out the request and reception of responses was recorded for 100 requests. The simulation was repeated varying the available capacity form 100 kb/s to 56 Mb/s in steps. The result shows that a capacity of 3 Mb/s can support the proper functioning of a DR system.