Performance and applicability of a new geographic routing protocol for virtual power plants

Abstract

The Smart Grid (SG) incorporates communication networks to the conventional electricity system in order to intelligently integrate distributed energy resources (DERs) and allow for demand side management. The move to Smart grid in developing countries has to cope with great disparities of ICT infrastructures even within the same city. Besides, individual DERs are often too small to be allowed access to energy market, likewise power utilities are unable to effectively control and manage small DERs. We propose the use of affordable and scalable wireless communication technology to aggregate geographically sparse DERs into a single virtual power plant. The enrollment of prosumers in the VPP is conditional to financial performance of the plant. Thus, the VPPs are dynamic and are expected to scale up as more and more prosumers are attracted by their financial benefits. the communication network has to follow this progression and therefore to be scalable and rapidly deploy-able.

GRACO: a geographic GReedy routing with an ACO based void handling technique

“…There is no smart grid for all, every energy grid will develop its own applications and services. Therefore, many services and concepts related to smart grid such as Virtual Power Plant (VPP) [42] [43] and distributed energy and storage integration into the grid [44] are expected to require partial or fully distributed control and the ICT deployed in parallel to the electrical grid should be scalable and should not introduce additional constraints to the smart grid development. For this purpose, we plan to study and analyze the applications supported by NAN in order to define NAN communication requirements, and to implement an extension of GRACO that takes account of the QoS required.…”