Joint Data Compression and MAC Protocol Design for Smartgrids with Renewable Energy

The future energy grid is expected to integrate more distributed and renewable energy resources with significantly enhanced communications infrastructure for timely and reliable data exchanges between the control center and various grid control and monitoring points [1]. Smartgrid is an example of the cyber-physical system (CPS) that integrates different communications, control, and computing technologies [2]. Smartgrid communications infrastructure is an important component of the future smartgrid that enables to support many critical grid control, monitoring, and management operations and emerging smartgrid applications [2]-[4]. The smartgrid communications infrastructure is typically hierarchical, i.e., data communications between customer premises (smart meters (SMs)) and local concentrators and between local concentrators and the utility company are supported by field/neighborhood area networks and long-haul wide area networks, respectively [5]-[8]. The former is usually based on the low bandwidth communications technologies such as Zigbee, WiFi, and power line communications (PLC) while the later is required to have higher capacity, which can be realized by employing LTE, 3G cellular, WiMAX, and fiber optics for example. Manuscript received December 23, 2014; accepted June 11, 2016. The editor coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication is Dr. Yun Rui. L. T. Tan is with the School of Electrical Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, AZ, USA.