Page 331 - From Smart Grid to Internet of Energy

Internet of things for smart grid applications Chapter 7 295

terms of load control and energy efficiency management. The bidirectional data
transmission ability of AMI enables service providers to develop automatic bill-
ing and real-time pricing programs to direct DSM. The most important contri-
bution of AMI and DSM integration is to determine the instant load demand that
enables service providers to manage energy price and tariff considering peak
demand and real time load analyses. The dynamic price management is inher-
ited from DR concept where it is classified within three kinds as ToU, RTP, and
CPP as discussed earlier. The RTP that is the most effective method since it
decreases the peak consumption demand among them can be achieved by using
a complete deployed AMI into distribution network. The communication
methods that are used for AMI applications are similar to any other IoT appli-
cation as being PLC in wired medium or Wi-Fi, cellular technologies, Blue-
tooth, WiMAX, and other wireless technologies. Although PLC has been
mentioned in some applications, a high share of the communication technolo-
gies is comprised by wireless systems owing to their coverage range, privacy
and security precautions, efficient bandwidth, and low error rate.
PLC technology achieved great interest since it utilizes the existing power
networks as transmission medium. Several researches and surveys on PLC com-
munication of smart grid have been proposed in literature. Although it is an
advantage that PLC does not require a transmission channel installation, tech-
nical features of PLC causes a number of noises and attenuation on the trans-
mitted signal. In order to tackle these drawbacks of PLC, associating the PLC
with wireless communication infrastructure may overcome these and limited
bandwidth drawbacks. Mahmoud et al. proposed LTE cellular networks in
AMI application due to reliability, availability, and coverage area issues that
an AMI LTE network has been implemented on 802.11s-based WMN [1, 64,
68, 69].
A heterogeneous AMI structure including several wireless communication
systems modeled and analyzed in several researches where a number of heuris-
tic models implemented to solve current AMI network drawbacks. It was
remarked that the implemented model was capable to define available number
of resources, routes among the SMs, the UDAPs, and the cellular base stations.
The interference issues were particularly researched for network initialization,
address distribution and routing control situations in HTAMI as an alternative to
current studies considered for low traffic AMI applications.

7.6 Open issues and future research directions

Despite extensive researches for transforming conventional utility grid to smart
grid have been performed up to date, there still major challenges exist to be
solved for improving interoperability, connectivity, reliability and security of
smart grid CPS. Since the smart grid infrastructure encompasses comprehensive
interaction of power generation, transmission, distribution and consumption
environments, it requires a widespread and reliable communication interface