Optimization of stochastic lossy transport networks and applications to power grids

Motivated by developments in renewable energy and smart grids, we formulate a stylized mathematical model of a transport network with stochastic load fluctuations. Using an affine control rule, we explore the trade-off between the number of controllable resources in a lossy transport network and the performance gain they yield in terms of expected power losses. Our results are explicit and reveal the interaction between the level of flexibility, the intrinsic load uncertainty and the network structure.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figure

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

Distributed Adaptive Primal Algorithm for P2P-ETS over Unreliable Communication Links

Algorithms for distributed coordination and control are increasingly being used in smart grid applications including peer-to-peer energy trading and sharing to improve reliability and efficiency of the power system. However, for realistic deployment of these algorithms, their designs should take into account the suboptimal conditions of the communication network, in particular the communication links that connect the energy trading entities in the energy network. This study proposes a distributed adaptive primal (DAP) routing algorithm to facilitate communication and coordination among proactive prosumers in an energy network over imperfect communication links. The proposed technique employs a multi-commodity flow optimization scheme in its formulation with the objective to minimize both the communication delay and loss of energy transactional messages due to suboptimal network conditions. Taking into account realistic constraints relating to network delay and communication link capacity between the peers, the DAP routing algorithm is used to evaluate network performance using various figures of merit such as probability of signal loss, message delay, congestion and different network topologies. Further, we address the link communication delay problem by redirecting traffic from congested links to less utilized ones. The results show that the proposed routing algorithm is robust to packet loss on the communication links with a 20% reduction in delay compared with hop-by-hop adaptive link state routing algorith