Abstract
Due to changed power consumption patterns, technological advance and deregulation, the appearance of the power grid in the low and medium voltage segment has changed. The spread of heating and cooling with electrical energy and an increase of electric vehicles as well as the broad rollout of photovoltaic systems has a major impact on the peak power demand of modern households and the volatility smart grids have to face. Thus, besides the load impact of the growing population of electric vehicles, modern households are not only consumers of electrical power, but also power producers, so called prosumers. The rising number of prosumers and the limitations of grid capacities lead to an increasingly distributed system of heterogeneous components, which have to be managed and operated with locality and scalability in mind. Virtualisation technologies, particularly known as state of the art in data centre computing, can lead to a paradigm shift needed to meet the growing demands of this evolution. A key issue here is to forward data to the correct data sinks, where data are required in order to keep the grid balanced. This routing process has to be able to react on grid changes in a timely manner, i.e., it must be based on the instantaneous state of the grid. In this paper, we propose a solution based on virtualising the communication infrastructure in the low and medium voltage grid. We evaluate two different approaches. The first approach is based on SDN; an ONOS SDN controller is used to change the behaviour of the communication infrastructure according to information provided by components of the power grid. The second approach uses Coaty and a Mosquitto MQTT broker to deliver messages to the desired endpoint, again based on information from the power grid.
Highlights
Smart grids rely on at least two kinds of networks: on one hand, the power grid which is used to transfer the energy from producers to consumers, and, on the other hand, the communication network used to transmit data between the various participants within the smart grids
The information forwarding follows the conditions given by the commonly applied forwarding and routing protocols such as Internet protocol (IP). This changes for the other two approaches: The middleware approach (Coaty) uses meta information of published messages such as topic titles, data formats, etc. in order to store messages within message queues and message receivers pull these messages on demand
The smart grid communication network should be able to deal with dynamic changes in the power grid
Summary
Smart grids rely on at least two kinds of networks: on one hand, the power grid which is used to transfer the energy from producers to consumers, and, on the other hand, the communication network used to transmit data between the various participants within the smart grids. If the data are used for critical control algorithms, dependability measures have to be taken into account Concerning these preconditions, we evaluated contemporary methodologies on virtualisation already known from information and communication technology (ICT) to solve the above mentioned dilemma for smart grids. We chose two promising concepts on how to virtualise the communication layer of a smart grid, namely software-defined networking (SDN) and state-of-the-art cloud technology. For both approaches, we created proof-of-concept implementations, conducted several tests with these prototypes, and compared the results.
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