An experimental communication architecture for monitoring and control of sub-grids

The Smart Grid promises to provide better monitoring and control by incorporating the communication network over the power network. We investigate the monitoring and control of distribution sub-Grids, for example to a local area in a city. We propose a communication architecture to be deployed into a real local area of the sub-Grid to provide a test bed for supporting real-time data and predictive real-time system control. This is one of the main challenges of the Smart Grid. Our system design is aimed at investigating two key issues: firstly, energy constraints in wireless sensor networks and secondly, achieving an appropriate balance between central and distributed control of the sub-Grid. We propose an energy efficient distributed architecture, for control and communication and explain how it will be implemented in our experimental test bed. Also, TinyDB, which is a query processing system for sensor networks, has been extended to collect the real-time data from the environment, and make them accessible by the local control unit. Finally, a visualization tool has been developed to integrate the map view of the test bed, display the real-time data, and send an alert to the network operator for finer-grained control over the system.