Abstract
The Smart Grid represents a revolution especially at distribution and customer levels, bringing monitoring and control capabilities, traditionally available up to the primary substations, down to the secondary substations, and beyond. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications networks are key to enable managing the huge number of sensors and actuators distributed all over the low voltage and medium voltage networks. Such M2M communications networks must meet demanding requirements from the technical perspective (e.g., low latency, high availability), since eventually the stability of the grid may rely on them, and from the economic perspective (e.g., low deployment and operational costs), due to the huge volume of devices to be monitored and controlled. Thus, Power Line Communications (PLC) technologies are winning momentum in these scenarios because they represent a great trade-off between both perspectives. However, electrical networks also represent a harsh communications medium, mainly because they are not designed for data communications, but for power transmission. Consequently, although much research has been carried out on this topic recently, PLC networks still present technological problems and challenges. This paper highlights some of the most relevant challenges in this area and presents a set of cutting-edge software tools which are being developed to overcome them, facilitating the planning, deployment, and operation of this kind of networks.
Highlights
The Smart Grid represents a revolution, especially at the distribution and customer domains, due to the following reasons:(i) First, the most radical changes are introduced at the medium voltage (MV) and low voltage (LV) networks, for example, Distributed Generation (DG) based on renewables, Electric Vehicle (EV), or Residential Demand Response (RDR).(ii) Second, the management of the electrical grid has traditionally been focused on the bulk generation and transmission domains, based on the so-called Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, which were deployed down to the primary substations, responsible for transforming high voltage into medium voltage levels
(ii) Simulation tools that facilitate the planning, evaluation, and deployment of Power Line Communications (PLC) networks, minimizing risks, time, and cost. This paper addresses both issues, presenting a set of cutting-edge software tools that have been developed for these purposes
The Contention Free Period (CFP) is employed for data transmission and three Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) variants are considered [21]: (1) Centralized TDMA, where the master allocates time slots for every path between a given node and the gateway; (2) Dynamic TDMA Polling, where the master fixes the slots at the beginning of each transmission period based on the result of polling all the nodes in the cell; and (3) Distributed TDMA, where the master only assigns slots to its neighbors and delegates to them the responsibility of allocating time slots to their corresponding neighbors
Summary
The Smart Grid represents a revolution, especially at the distribution and customer domains, due to the following reasons:. Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications networks are especially important in the Smart Grid in that they are key to enable effectively managing the aforementioned huge number of sensors and actuators distributed all over the MV and LV networks As a result, such M2M communications networks must meet demanding requirements from the technical perspective (e.g., low latency, high availability) [1], since eventually the stability of the electrical grid may rely on them, and from the economic perspective (e.g., low deployment and operational costs) [2], due to the huge volume of devices to be monitored and controlled. PoweRline Intelligent Metering Evolution (PRIME) stands as a promising NB-PLC technology out of the available ones The specification of this technology has been driven by market leaders such as Iberdrola and Texas Instruments and it has recently become an international standard (ITU-T G.9904) [4].
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