Page 212 - From Smart Grid to Internet of Energy

188 From smart grid to internet of energy

technology cannot contact with other networks configured according to differ-
ent technologies unless a specific gateway is utilized among the networks.

5.3.6 ISA100.11a
International Society of Automation (ISA) developed the ISA100.11a in 2009
that is a wireless networking technology, and it is approved by the IEC with
62734 standard code in 2014. Different from the formerly proposed wireless
networking technologies, the ISA100.11a aims to provide new perspectives
in terms of connectivity, flexibility, reliability, coverage and security concepts.
This technology is powerful against noise and interference effects that are
widely available in industrial environments. Therefore, the ISA100.11a tech-
nology ensures robust, reliable and secure wireless communications for uncrit-
ical monitoring, controlling and management applications whose latency value
may be high as much as several hundreds of milliseconds. In addition, it is able
to function with other wireless technologies developed based on the IEEE
802.11 and IEEE 802.15 standards.
The network and transport layers of this technology are designed depend on
the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), 6LoWPAN and User Datagram Protocol
(UDP) standards whereas data link layer is developed individually in which
graph routing, frequency hopping, and time-slotted TDMA transactions are
accomplished [28]. There exist two major devices in the network established
based on the ISA100.11a that are named field devices and infrastructure
devices. The field devices are composed of data acquisition devices, routers
and mobile devices whereas infrastructure devices comprise backbone routers,
gateways and security devices [31, 32]. The backbone routers present some
important advantages that may be sorted out as enhancing network reliability,
developing throughput, reducing latency and reducing traffic problems. The
comparison of protocol characteristics of IEEE 802.15.4 based emerging tech-
nologies is illustrated in Fig. 5.7. The layers of these technologies are abstracted
by considering seven-layer OSI reference model where blanks shown in the fig-
ure refer that standards do not enclose interested protocol(s).

5.3.7 6LoWPAN
In 2005, a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the
Internet area has aimed to develop a wireless communication technology
enabling the IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 networks, and introduced 6LoWPAN
technology. This technology intended to present a new concept in which net-
works based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standards are able to communicate with each
other by means of the IP system directly. Therefore, 6LoWPAN technology
ensures the interoperability of wireless communication technologies by inte-
grating WSNs to the Internet. The 6LoWPAN technology determines some
methods such as encapsulation and header compression that permit IPv6