Network selection criterion for ubiquitous communication provisioning in smart cities for smart energy system

Abstract

With the expansion of urbanization, energy becomes one of the foremost requirements of a smart city. Low energy consumption, renewable energy, and carbon footprints reduction are prime targets of a smart city. A smart city needs to be energy efficient and technology driven. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) helps to improve system efficiency and creates a way for the end consumer to communicate with utilities and the network service provider. The two-way communication model of a smart grid makes possible reliable, stable and efficient communication between utility and consumer by using ICT. The major issue in smart energy system is the lack of necessary interoperability and integration of communication standards, which hampers the effective deployment of communication networks. In this paper, we present a hierarchical architecture to resolve this issue, which will support smart energy system infrastructure and services in smart cities for provisioning of ubiquitous communication. It consists of two computing zones (fog computing and cloud computing) along with two implementation phases (initial and final). Fog computing will help to offer low latency response to anomalous and hazardous events in real time while reducing a burden on the cloud for computing as well as storage. To provide ubiquitous communication in smart energy system for data acquisition, a network selection algorithm has been proposed. TOPSIS MADM technique is employed for network selection in a heterogeneous environment at HAN/NAN (Bluetooth, Zigbee, Z-Wave, WLAN, LoRaWAN) and WAN (GPRS, UMTS, LTE, and WiMAX) levels of smart energy system's multilayer communication infrastructure. Coverage area, data rate, power consumption and security level attributes are employed for network selection. The results revealed that WLAN performed better in case of HAN/NAN environment, whereas LTE worked best at WAN level.