Sensor network web services for Demand-Side Energy Management applications in the smart grid

Abstract

Sensor network web services have recently emerged as promising tools to provide remote management, data collection and querying capabilities for sensor networks. They can be utilized in a large number of fields among which Demand-Side Energy Management (DSEM) is an important application area that has become possible with the smart electrical power grid. DSEM applications generally aim to reduce the cost and the amount of power consumption. In the traditional power grid, DSEM has not been implemented widely due to the large number of households and lack of fine-grained automation tools. However by employing intelligent devices and implementing communication infrastructure among these devices, the smart grid will renovate the existing power grid and it will enable a wide variety of DSEM applications. In this paper, we analyze various DSEM scenarios that become available with sensor network web services. We assume a smart home with a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) where the sensors are mounted on the appliances and they are able to run web services. The web server retrieves data from the appliances via the web services running on the sensor nodes. These data can be stored in a database after processing, where the database can be accessed by the utility, as well as the inhabitants of the smart home. We show that our implementation is efficient in terms of running time. Moreover, the message sizes and the implementation code is quite small which makes it suitable for the memory-limited sensor nodes. Furthermore, we show the application scenarios introduced in the paper provide energy saving for the smart home.