Communication requirements for

DSM
Presented by
Muhammad Afzal
 Introduction
• SG and Communication Devices
Demand side management(DSM)
DSM refers to “Actions taken on the
customer's side of the meter to change the
amount or timing of energy consumption.
Electricity DSM strategies have the goal of
maximizing end-use efficiency to avoid or
postpone the construction of new generating
plants."

[USA Department of Energy]

 Demand side management(DSM)
• “Demand Side Management” is the
modification of consumer’s demand of
electricity through various methods such as
financial incentives and consumer education

• Usually the goal of DSM is to encourage the

consumers to use less energy during peak
hours or to move the time of energy use to
the off-peak hours viz. night
System model[81] DSM
 DSM is often understood to include two components
i. Energy efficiency (EE)
ii. demand response (DR)
• EE is designed to reduce electricity consumption during
all hours of the year;
• DR is designed to change on-site demand for energy in
intervals and associated timing of electric demand by
transmitting changes in prices, load control signals or
other incentives to end-users to reflect existing
production and delivery costs [43].
• Thus DSM will always try to encourage
consumers to:
– Use less energy during Peak hours (Peak
Clipping)
– Shift energy use to off peak hours (Valley Filling)
The NIST Conceptual Model for SG
 Technology in DSM

 Communications : Automated Metering

Infrastructure (AMI) – LAN, WAN, HAN
 Customer Area
• This NIST architecture is fully illustrated and
organized architecture among in-hand or in
literature.
• This architecture further classified customer
area into following three categories
1. Neighborhood Area Network(NAN)
2. Building Area Network (BAN)
3. Home Area Network (HAN)
 Neighborhood Area Network(NAN)
• Different Building Area Networks (BANs) combined
together to form Neighborhood Area Networks
(NANs).
• A NAN includes one or more 3G support stations
and number of BANs.
• The NAN Gateway (GW) can observe how much
energy is being distributed to any particular
neighborhood.
 Building Area Network (BAN)
• Different Home Area Network’s (HAN)
apartments combine to form Building Area
Networks (BANs).
• Every building linked to the power grid
maintains its own BAN.
• The BAN gate way (GW) can be used to
supervise the power usage and requirement
of the building of residents.
 Home Area Network (HAN)
• Each apartment or home has their own Local Area Network
(LAN) that is referred to Home Area Networks (HANs).

• Within a home, different appliances, devices or meters can

communicate in Home Area Network.

• The HAN gateways are can be used to facilitate Machine to

Machine (M2M) communications in the smart grid
framework.
• These networks either wireless or wired networks,
depends on scenarios.

• These networks support smart metering, messaging

among devices, energy controlling devices, applications
and consumers.

• These network also driven communication and

applications from Building Automation and control
network (BACnet), Home Energy Management System
(HEMS) or some other energy management systems .
 Wireless Technologies for DSM
• Due to infrastructure-less topology, low power
consumption, low cost of deployment, flexible, auto-
managed and easy availability, wireless technologies are
becoming promising communication technology for smart
grid.

• Currently, we have numerous wireless technologies for long

range smart grid applications like Satellite communications,
Cellular mobile communications, Radio Frequency (RF) and
with lots of short range communications like Infrared (IR),
Bluetooth, ZigBee, Near Field Communication (NFC), Ultra
Wide Band (UWB) etc.
• This section illustrates the opportunities and
limitations for different wireless technologies for
achieving a range of applications for smart grid
technology.
• ZigBee
• Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN)
• Worldwide Inter-operability for Microwave
Access (WiMAX)
• Cellular Communications
• Wireless Mesh Network
 1. ZigBee
• According to NIST the most suitable standard for smart grid Home Area
Network (SG-HAN) is ZigBee and ZigBee SEP.

• This wireless technology is reliable, low cost, low power consumer and
more suitable for home appliances communications, energy monitoring,
home meter reading and home automation.

• Devices that use ZigBee protocol can easly communicate with ZigBee
smart meters and ZigBee SEP specially design to send information of smart
meters to the HAN owner to check timely their home energy level .

• This technology developed by ZigBee Alliance working on an open

standard but having compatibility with IEEE 802.15.4 standard.
• It has unlicensed frequency range that vary
864MHz, 915 MHz and 2.4 GHz and follow DSSS
modulation scheme.

• The data rate of ZigBee ranged 20-250 Kbps and

coverage area is approximate 10-100m .

• ZigBee communication is considered secure

because it has adopted 128-bit AES encryption
scheme for security .It can be support star, tree
and mesh topologies.
• ZigBee devices mostly have limited memory and processing
capability that hinder its utilities other than HAN.

• In-fact the utilization of ZigBee in Industry Area Networks

(IAN) is vital but due to aforementioned issues and not well
document, this technology still has no room in IAN.

• Other main issue that ZigBee faces is interference problem

with WiFi or WLAN communication signal that has also same
non-licensed band of frequency;

• This research issue still needs some more attention.

 2. Wireless Local Area Network
(WLAN)
• The Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is truly needed
for major wireless communication technology for future
smart grid that provides vigorous, high speed and fast,
point to point (P2P) and point to multipoint (P2M)
communications.

• The WLAN belongs to IEEE 802.11 standard family, moistly

follow spread spectrum technology for providing high
bandwidth to multiple users simultaneously engage the
same band of frequency.

• Spread spectrum can also minimize the interference among

users .
• In smart grid the WLAN can be used for
monitoring and distribution of sub-stations.

• WLAN should be the best choice for the

region where wired links are very difficult.
 3. Worldwide Inter-operability for
Microwave Access (WiMAX)
• WiMAX technology belongs to 802.16 series standards
that is a family of Wireless Metropolitan Area Network
(WMAN).

• Wi-MAX technology recognized as local loop that

allows receiving of data by microwave signals and
broadcast signal by radio waves.

• It has both types of spectrum, licensed and un-

licensed, licensed spectrums are 2.3, 2.5 and 3.5 GHz
and un-licensed spectrum operates at 5.8GHz
frequency.
• It support data rate approximately 70 Mbps with coverage
area up to 48Km.

• Due to its coverage range and high data rate this

technology is best fit in smart micro grid and AMI
(Advanced Metering Infrastructure).

• For any monitoring purpose, WiMAX technology should be

first choice in smart grid communication networks.

• The deployment of WiMAX is bit costly due to its tower,

intelligently places the tower may reduce its cost.
 4. Cellular Communications
• A cellular communication network, such as 3G
(WCDMA, CDMA-2000), 4G, and GSM are based on
radio network dispersed over land surface areas known
as cells, served by base station.

• It is speedy and cost effective to establish data

communications exposure over a big geographic area .

• The licensed frequency bands of 3rd Generation (3G)

or 4th Generation (4G) cellular technology perform its
operation on 824-894MHz or 1900MHz.
• The cellular communication has 60-240Kbps data
transmission rate.

• Distance coverage is not fix, depends on the cellular service

availability.

• For smart grid cellular communication has vital role, it has

already strong structure that may be used in smart grid
applications.

• In author explained that for remote substation i.e. Remote

Terminal Unit (RTU) and SCADA communication occurs by
means of cellular communications.
 5. Wireless Mesh Network
• A network that is based on mesh topology,
nodes are communicating through radio links
are called a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN),
emerging as an essential wireless technology.

• IEEE 802.11 and 802.16 are actively working

on developing new specifications for WMNs.
• WMN is actually a self organized and easily
self configured, this property of WMN is
essential for smart grid communication system
automation.

• This feature also enables electric or power

utilities to deal with new connectivity
requirements determined by customer
demands.
 AUTOMATED METERING SYSTEMS
(AMI)
• Implementation of advanced meter
infrastructure (AMI) will allow the electric utility
to communicate directly with customers and
create new opportunities for service.

– Provide interface between the utility ad its customers:

bi-direction control
– Advanced functionality
• Real-time electricity pricing
• Accurate load characterization
• Outage detection/restoration
 Challenges to Apply Wireless
Technologies
• Indeed wireless technologies have emerged as a key breakthrough in fixed
wired technologies, in smart grid.

• it can be changed messy wired connections of power grids into clean,

manageable and flexible atmosphere.

• Implementation of this wireless technologies take various performance,

security and other technical challenges.

• The key technical challenges and issues of wireless technologies in smart

grid applications should be summarized as follows.
• Recourse Constrains
• Scathing environmental Conditions
• High Bit Error Rates
• Secure Communications
 1. Recourse Constrains
• In general we can observe that mostly wireless
technologies have inadequate battery power
supply.

• The most frequent constraints, that wireless

technologies observed are energy, memory and
processing capacity constraints.

• These are few very important considerations that

limit the migration of smart grid wired
technologies to wireless technologies.
2. Scathing environmental Conditions
• Wireless communication has directly affected
by their surroundings and harsh environment
may disrupt the proper communications.

• In smart grid applications, wireless

communications may agitate by highly caustic
environments, vibrations, humidity levels,
dust, radiations and various unseeing noises.
 3. High Bit Error Rates
• The bandwidth and latency at each link of
wireless are location dependent and varying
continuously that make wireless
communication difficult to meet quality of
service requirements.

• Due to noisy environment of electric power

systems and obstructions, wireless
communication observes high bit error rates.
 4. Secure Communications
• wireless technology prone to security attacks
specially denial of service (DoS) attack,
ciphering, wormhole attacks, black-hole
attacks etc.

• presence of these dangerous attacks, wireless

technologies always at high security risk.
• Wireless technologies are on air that’s why
security is a major concern for this technology
and may be the biggest challenge for
deploying in smart grid.

• Secure data storage and information

exchanges are enormously vital for energy
utilities, particularly for smart billing and
power grids control .
 Compression of Various Wireless
Technologies for Smart Grid
• Varieties of wireless technologies for smart
grid have been compared and provided a
comparative study based on key parameters
that illustrated in Table 1.
 References

• A Comparative Study among Possible Wireless Technologies

for Smart Grid Communication Networks by Kashif Laeeq
• Smart Grid – The New and Improved Power Grid: A Survey
by Xi Fang, Student Member, IEEE, Satyajayant Misra,
Member, IEEE, Guoliang Xue, Fellow, IEEE,and Dejun Yang,
Student Member, IEEE
• Some other Related martial of SG from diffent presention and
webside.
Thank you.

Questions, Comments, …?

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