Implementation of Highly Accurate Test-Bed for Practical Evaluation of Wired and Wireless Internet Based Smart Grid Communications

There have been a number of previous studies for implementing low cost and easily deployable communication networks to support smart grid services such as demand side management, automatic metering infrastructure, and virtual power plants. The outcome of the research showed us that internet based communication is the best option for low-cost, reliable and fast deployment. However, different characteristics of the internet in terms of speed and reliability should be investigated practically to help design smart grid services. In this paper, we practically evaluated the robustness of the United-Kingdom (UK) Internet network for demand response services. Further, the internet connectivity of consumer premises has been evaluated regarding its suitability for sending short control packets, in terms of packet loss and latency. From the results it can be seen that the cable broadband and fourth Generation (4G) wireless access networks have better performance in terms of packet loss and latency whereas third Generation (3G) wireless networks show significantly poorer results.

[1]  Teruya Fujii,et al.  Experimental Analysis of TCP and UDP during LTE Handover , 2012, 2012 IEEE 75th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring).

[2]  Gareth A. Taylor,et al.  Evaluation of Throughput and Latency Performance for Medium Voltage and Low Voltage Communication Infrastructures , 2012 .

[3]  Yaghoub Azizi,et al.  GPS clock based one way delay measurement and modeling in web environment , 2014, 2014 4th International Conference on Computer and Knowledge Engineering (ICCKE).

[4]  Jonas Neander,et al.  Performance Evaluation of IEC 61850-90-5 over a latency optimized 3GPP LTE Network , 2018, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm).

[5]  Emilio Ghiani,et al.  Evaluation of Smart Grid Communication Technologies with a Co-Simulation Platform , 2017, IEEE Wireless Communications.

[6]  W. Richard Stevens,et al.  TCP Slow Start, Congestion Avoidance, Fast Retransmit, and Fast Recovery Algorithms , 1997, RFC.

[7]  Saifur Rahman,et al.  Performance Evaluation of Communication Technologies and Network Structure for Smart Grid Applications , 2019, IET Commun..

[8]  John S. Thompson,et al.  Practical Evaluation of UK Internet Network Characteristics For Demand-Side Response Applications , 2018, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids (SmartGridComm).

[9]  Ki-Young Koo,et al.  Time synchronization for wireless sensors by using low-cost GPS module , 2015 .

[10]  Pierre Clarel Catherine,et al.  Experimental performance comparison between TCP vs UDP tunnel using OpenVPN , 2015, 2015 International Conference on Computing, Communication and Security (ICCCS).

[11]  Mohammad Hossein Refan,et al.  Design and implementation of a GPS based DCS network time synchronization board , 2011, The 3rd Conference on Thermal Power Plants.

[12]  Yilu Liu,et al.  An evaluation of network time protocol for clock synchronization in wide area measurements , 2008, 2008 IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting - Conversion and Delivery of Electrical Energy in the 21st Century.