Two-way seamless communication is the key aspect of realizing the vision of smart grid. There are several standardized wired and wireless communication technologies available for various smart grid applications. With the recent growth in wireless communication, it can offer standardized technologies for wide area, metropolitan area, local area, and personal area networks. Moreover, wireless technologies not only offer significant benefits over wired, such as including low installation cost, rapid deployment, mobility, etc., but also more suitable for remote end applications. Several activities are going on to explore specific applications of these technologies in smart grid environment. This paper presents various smart grid applications achieved through standardized wireless communication technologies, e.g. IEEE 802.11 based wireless LAN, IEEE 802.16 based WiMAX, 3G/4G cellular, ZigBee based on IEEE 802.15, IEEE 802.20 based MobileFi, etc. Moreover, challenges related to each wireless communication technologies have been discussed in brief.

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To achieve interoperability among multi-vendor substation automation devices, international electro-technical commission (IEC) has published IEC 61850 standard for communication networks within power substations. This standard specifies the communication systems based on Ethernet networks for the substation automation systems (SAS). Ethernet provides flexibility in terms of configuring various architectures with the help of Ethernet switches. However, the reliability and availability of the applicable Ethernet architectures need to be analyzed before they are implemented for critical applications in substations. This paper presents the reliability and availability evaluation of the practical Ethernet switch architectures using reliability block diagram (RBD) approach. The reliability block diagrams have been built for the intra-bay and inter-bay communications considering a typical transmission substation. Further, the reliability and availability of the practical Ethernet architectures have been compared and some suggestions have been made using the final results. VIII. BIOGRAPHIESMitalkumar G. Kanabar (S'05) is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree at Electrical and Computer Engineering

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