Page 311 - From Smart Grid to Internet of Energy

Internet of things for smart grid applications Chapter 7 277

of wireless broadband standards. However, IEEE 802.16e that is announced in
2005 mobile broadband wireless access system and IEEE 802.16e assigned for
multihop relay in 2009 are prominent technologies improving IoT applications.
WiMAX systems employ several stations as base station, subscriber station, and
relay station that interconnects the other stations. The wide coverage range of
WiMAX triggers the researches of LPWAN technologies that are specified for
IoT. Some of the recent low power WAN technologies such as SigFox, LoRa,
Weightless, and Ingenu find wide usage chance in IoT applications. On the
other hand, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has designed and proposed
the IPv6 stack for 6LoWPAN to perform IP-based connectivity with ultra-low
power devices and applications. The IEEE 802.16 provides convenient solu-
tions to smart grid applications in geographically spanned areas and energy effi-
ciency [45, 48].

7.4 IoT protocols and services

A huge number of general and special purpose applications are available in IoT
infrastructure that provides specific contributions to smart grid applications.
These applications and middleware perform various operations and require fea-
tured services. As discussed earlier, the IoT services are listed into four catego-
ries as identity-related services, information aggregation services,
collaborative-aware services and ubiquitous services. The identity-related ser-
vices fulfill the identification process for any type of thing located in the IoT
environment. These services can be active or passive where the passive services
do not require any power source for operating, while the active services include
a power source. RFID tags are essential example to these services where passive
RFID tags are operated by using external electromagnetic field to identify the
thing while active RFID tags have power sources to transmit the identification
signal to external devices. Some of the identity-related services are passive pay-
ment systems, internet access and bankcard services, mobile wallet applica-
tions, ticket and charge services etc.
Once any application supported by identity-related services identifies the
device or thing, information acquisition services act to get uniform resource
identifier (URI) from name definition server. The IoT information server is
operated by a series of information aggregation services that acquire and store
the data and transmit the data to communication platform. The information
aggregation services collaborate with many types of communication systems
to deploy the obtained data from sensing devices. M2M nodes, communication
medium, middleware applications, and OS comprise the information aggrega-
tion system. In a comprehensive communication medium, the wireless or
mobile communication network includes gateway devices to manage access
and applications. These gateways aggregate terminals, nodes, networks, and
service interfaces for users [48, 49]. The detailed service modules and functions
have been illustrated in Fig. 7.6 where the M2M platform is interfaced by