Page 332 - From Smart Grid to Internet of Energy

296 From smart grid to internet of energy

to control, manage and monitor this system. The complexity and heterogeneity
of power and communication systems comprising the smart grid infrastructure
poses challenges on interoperability of devices, cyber-physical security, resil-
iency, and data management issues. Although the widespread operation area of
smart grid draws a heterogenous ecosystem, the major challenges can be cate-
gorized into threefold as control, communication and security of system. The
challenges on control issues are met at generation, transmission, distribution,
and consumption levels that include DER integration, remote monitoring, trans-
mission line monitoring, PMU and PQ analysis, RES integration, DSM, DR,
load management, interoperability, and emerging EV applications. It is widely
accepted that most of these challenges relating to control issues have been
solved, and recent studies have proposed various control methods to overcome
power network deficiencies. However, use of communication systems based on
vast amount of different technologies and protocols poses several challenges on
interoperability and security issues.
The smart grid communication network is defined as system of systems due
to massive diversity of communication technologies. The surveyed smart grid
studies indicate that modeling, analysis, and implementation researches may
meet many of the new challenges in terms of power grid and communication
systems integration. The operating, control, and monitoring systems of power
grid requires wired and wireless communication infrastructures, and thus a wide
variety of ICT and CPS interaction researches are required to improve commu-
nication network challenges. While the communication networks are funda-
mental to improve development of smart grid, several challenges are
addressed for a robust, secure, resilient, and operational smart grid communi-
cation network. The smart meters that are connected in HAN, BAN and NAN
topologies are prominent data sources of smart grid since they generate massive
data bases and require secure and efficient communication interfaces. More-
over, data concentrator configurations and MDMS are faced to several draw-
backs in communication base. The two-way communication infrastructure of
smart meters is essentially enabled by various wireless technologies such as
IEEE 802.15.4, IEEE 802.11, cellular, and area networks. Therefore, the diver-
sity of communication technologies operating in the same infrastructure
requires standardized protocol and application interfaces to ensure interopera-
bility of entire system. To this end, generic APIs and middleware developments
are required to tackle major challenges of heterogenous infrastructure of com-
munication technologies.
In addition to monitoring and management researches, industrial WSN net-
work and IIoT applications as ZigBee, WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, WIA-PA
and smart grid interaction researches have been determined in the literature.
WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, and WIA-PA were particularly designed for auto-
mation applications, while ZigBee has been introduced for industrial automa-
tion applications. As discussed earlier, most recent and robust technology for
these industrial standards is 6LoWPAN that is an IP based standard. On the