A Survey of Communications and Networking Technologies for Energy Management in Buildings and Home Automation

Abstract

With the exploding power consumption in private households and increasing environmental and regulatory restraints, the need to improve the overall efficiency of electrical networks has never been greater. That being said, the most efficient way to minimize the power consumption is by voluntary mitigation of home electric energy consumption, based on energy-awareness and automatic or manual reduction of standby power of idling home appliances. Deploying bi-directional smart meters and home energy management (HEM) agents that provision real-time usage monitoring and remote control, will enable HEM in “smart households.” Furthermore, the traditionally inelastic demand curve has began to change, and these emerging HEM technologies enable consumers (industrial to residential) to respond to the energy market behavior to reduce their consumption at peak prices, to supply reserves on a as-needed basis, and to reduce demand on the electric grid. Because the development of smart grid-related activities has resulted in an increased interest in demand response (DR) and demand side management (DSM) programs, this paper presents some popular DR and DSM initiatives that include planning, implementation and evaluation techniques for reducing energy consumption and peak electricity demand. The paper then focuses on reviewing and distinguishing the various state-of-the-art HEM control and networking technologies, and outlines directions for promoting the shift towards a society with low energy demand and low greenhouse gas emissions. The paper also surveys the existing software and hardware tools, platforms, and test beds for evaluating the performance of the information and communications technologies that are at the core of future smart grids. It is envisioned that this paper will inspire future research and design efforts in developing standardized and user-friendly smart energy monitoring systems that are suitable for wide scale deployment in homes.

Multi-level reconfigurable self-organization in overlay services

“…These programs include the installation of smart sensors, controllers and thermostats in the households of consumers to extract almost real-time information about the energy consumption used in order to control it. Home automation technologies such as the ones reviewed by Kailas et al [2012] provide the following load management options:…”

“…Software agent technologies [Scerri et al, 2002, Kok et al, 2005, Kailas et al, 2012 installed in sources of household consumption and production are the technical means to make autonomous control possible.…”

“…An example of the latter communication scheme is illustrated by Stadler et al [2009]. These communication options are realistic according to the work of Guo et al [2005], James et al [2006], Hammerstrom et al [2010] and Kailas et al [2012]. EPOS exploits local alternative energy utilizations based on which thermostatic devices can operate.…”

Design and Implementation of an IoT Access Point for Smart Home

“…The development of IoT technologies can support a variety of applications, including the intelligent power grid [1][2][3][4], intelligent transportation [5,6], intelligent medicine and healthcare [7][8][9][10], intelligent art [11,12], intelligent logistics [13,14], intelligent environmental monitoring [15,16], smart life [17][18][19][20], etc. In a smart home context, numerous smart objects need to use wireless communications due to the requirements of supporting mobile applications and maintaining neat living space.…”

A Compilation of various Home Energy Management Systems in Smart Grid Networks

“…For example in [15], a day ahead pricing has been used in a HEM scheme to minimize the electricity charges of a consumer. The process of observing, controlling and conserving electricity usage is termed as HEM [16]. According to paper [17], more than 40% of global energy consumption is done by residential building and homes.…”