Influence of Communication Technologies in Smart Grid Power Congestion Management

One of the main target of smart grids consists in deploying efficient demand-side management strategies. Several communication technologies are used to transfer monitoring data and control commands from and to smart meters with different quality of service depending on the technology. The quality of service provided by cyber-physical networks can significantly impact the performance of demand-side management strategies. But, this quality of service is rarely considered in research works on smart grid management, leading to overestimating the advantages of smart grid technology. Therefore, the goal of our work is to quantify the performance degradation on demand-side management due to the quality of service provided by three communication technologies used for smart grids - namely PLC, Wi-Fi and Ethernet. This quantitative analysis relies on a residential grid congestion management case study and a coherent co-simulation environment. Two simple energy management policies (one centralized, the other decentralized) are considered. In addition, we present a sensitivity analysis over several parameters to highlight the limitations of communication technologies in this context of power congestion management.