Geographic routing protocol for the deployment of virtual power plant within the smart grid

Abstract Smart grid (SG) incorporates communication networks to conventional electricity system in order to intelligently integrate distributed energy resource (DERs) and to allow demand side management. The move to SG in developing countries has to cope with great disparities of information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructures even within the same city. Besides, individual DERs are often too small to be allowed access to the energy market. Likewise power utilities are unable to effectively control and manage small DERs. An affordable and scalable wireless communication technology is proposed to aggregate geographically sparse DERs into a single virtual power plant (VPP). An ant colony optimization (ACO) method is used for the first time to the best of our knowledge in conjunction with geographic greedy forwarding protocol to effectively deliver data packets without void problems for VPP. The VPP investigated is dynamic and expected to scale up as more and more prosumers are attracted to join it. The proposed communication network and protocol follow the progression of the VPP to allow scalability and rapid deployment. The routing algorithm used for data communication within the VPP supports centralized, decentralized or fully distributed controlled VPP's DERs.