For the Grid and Through the Grid: The Role of Power Line Communications in the Smart Grid

By Stefano Galli, Anna Scaglione, Zhifang Wang. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2010

1,055 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Are Power Line Communications (PLC) a good candidate for Smart Grid applications? The objective of this paper is to address this important question. To do so, we provide an overview of what PLC can deliver today by surveying its history and describing the most recent technological advances in the area. We then address Smart Grid applications as instances of sensor networking and network control problems and discuss the main conclusions one can draw from the literature on these subjects. The application scenario of PLC within the Smart Grid is then analyzed in detail. Because a necessary ingredient of network planning is modeling, we also discuss two aspects of engineering modeling that relate to our question. The first aspect is modeling the PLC channel through fading models. The second aspect we review is the Smart Grid control and traffic modeling problem which allows us to achieve a better understanding of the communications requirements. Finally, this paper reports recent studies on the electrical and topological properties of a sample power distribution network. Power grid topological studies are very important for PLC networking as the power grid is not only the information source but also the information delivery system-a unique feature when PLC is used for the Smart Grid.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Control and Systems Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ea8ed1f85f48ae00371d6a7d1058d8333ac7d17

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Citations in the corpus

The role of communication systems in smart grids: Architectures, technical solutions and research challenges (2013, background): “In addition to AMI networks the distribution tier will include specialized networks to provide reliable communications to a large number of heterogeneous sensors and actuators that will be deployed in smart grids to monitor and control power system equipment (e.g., circuit breakers, feeders and subs”
From Cloud to Fog Computing: A Review and a Conceptual Live VM Migration Framework (2017, background): “at which energy is generated by conventional methods as well as the need to reduce gas emission to control or curtail climate change [42].”
Energy-Efficient Information and Communication Infrastructures in the Smart Grid: A Survey on Interactions and Open Issues (2015, methodology): “Cellular, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WIMAX) and narrowband wireless communications are also among the utilized technologies for AMI.”