Abstract
Ubiquitous connectivity is already transforming residential dwellings into smart homes. As citizens continue to embrace the smart home paradigm, a new generation of low-rate and low-power communication systems is required to leverage the mass market presented by energy management in homes. Although Power Line Communication (PLC) technology has evolved in the last decade, the adaptation of PLC for constrained networks is not fully charted. By adapting some features of IEEE 802.15.4 and IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) into power lines, this paper demonstrates a low-rate, low-power PLC system over the IPv6 network (referred to as 6LoPLC), for Home Energy Management System (HEMS) applications. The overall idea is to provide a framework for assessing various scenarios that cannot be easily investigated with the limited number of evaluation hardware available. In this respect, a network model is developed in NS-3 (Version 21) to measure several important characteristics of the designed system and then validated with experimental results obtained using the Hanadu evaluation kits. Following the good agreement between the two, the NS-3 model is utilised to investigate more complex scenarios and various use-cases, such as the effects of impulsive noise, the number of nodes and packet size on the latency and Bit Error Rate (BER) performances. We further demonstrate that for different network and application configurations, optimal data sizes exist. For instance, the results reveal that in order to guarantee 99% system reliability, the HEMS application data must not exceed 64 bytes. Finally, it is shown that with impulsive noise in a HEMS network comprising 50 appliances, provided the size of the payload does not exceed 64 bytes, monitoring and control applications incur a maximum latency of 238.117 ms and 248.959 ms, respectively; both of which are within acceptable limits.
Highlights
As modern society’s appetite for energy appears insatiable, two fundamental issues are challenging the current energy generation-consumption model, namely sustainability and energy security
While the lighting is made of an Light-Emitting Diode (LED) fixture powered by 24 V DC, the Hanadu 6LoPLC units provide the communication system to convey control signals from the Home Energy Management System (HEMS) controller to the lamp and response in the opposite direction
It is generally known that impulsive noise degrades Power Line Communication (PLC) system performance, two key observations can be derived from Figure 11: (i) impulsive noise degrades the latency performance of the HEMS, regardless of the application size; (ii) larger application data are more susceptible to degradation, for example in the case of the 128-byte and 16-byte data sizes, the degradation in latency is as high as 32.759 ms and 1.8977 ms, respectively, in terms of additional delay caused by impulsive noise
Summary
As modern society’s appetite for energy appears insatiable, two fundamental issues are challenging the current energy generation-consumption model, namely sustainability and energy security. As the deployment of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) becomes commonplace, sophisticated monitoring and control capabilities are actively required within the home to optimise energy consumption in a bid to improve comfort and satisfaction levels without compromising safety. These capabilities can be realised through the integration of everyday appliances [3], Distributed. By dynamically controlling the behaviour of smart appliances to adapt to the grid conditions and market dynamics, additional benefits, such as sustainability and operational efficiency, on the utility side can be achieved; this is generally referred to as Demand Side Management (DSM).
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