Secure Real-Time Monitoring and Management of Smart Distribution Grid Using Shared Cellular Network

The electricity production and distribution is facing two major changes. First, the production is shifting from classical energy sources such as coal and nuclear power towards renewable resources such as solar and wind. Secondly, the consumption in the low voltage grid is expected to grow significantly due to expected introduction of electrical vehicles. The first step towards more efficient operational capabilities is to introduce an observability of the distribution system and allow for leveraging the flexibility of end connection points with manageable consumption, generation and storage capabilities. Thanks to the advanced measurement devices, management framework, and secure communication infrastructure developed in the FP7 SUNSEED project, the Distribution System Operator (DSO) now has full observability of the energy flows at the medium/low voltage grid. Furthermore, the prosumers are able to participate pro-actively and coordinate with the DSO and other stakeholders in the grid. The monitoring and management functionalities have strong requirements to the communication latency, reliability and security. This paper presents novel solutions and analyses of these aspects for the SUNSEED scenario, where the smart grid ICT solutions are provided through shared cellular LTE networks

Potential of energy-oriented network optimisation: Switching off over-capacity in off-peak hours

Mobile communication networks are usually planned to provide some minimum service quality level during peak traffic hours. Consequently, in off-peak hours, when traffic loads are lower, the network is characterised by over-capacity, in the sense that same service quality targets can typically be satisfied with a reduced set of network resources, e.g. sites, carriers, etc. In this paper, we propose a procedure for deriving the potential of energy-oriented network optimisation, and apply this procedure to the case of a UMTS/HSDPA network. Depending on the desired performance target and the energy consumption model, energy savings from energy-oriented network optimisation of up to about 40% are shown to be attainable. ©2010 IEEE

LTE delay assessment for real-time management of future smart grids

This study investigates the feasibility of using Long Term Evolution (LTE), for the real-time state estimation of the smart grids. This enables monitoring and control of future smart grids. The smart grid state estimation requires measurement reports from different nodes in the smart grid and therefore the uplink LTE radio delay performance is selected as key performance indicator. The analysis is conducted for two types of measurement nodes, namely smart meters (SMs) and wide area monitoring and supervision (WAMS) nodes, installed in the (future) smart grids. The SM and WAMS measurements are fundamental input for the real-time state estimation of the smart grid. The LTE delay evaluation approach is via ‘snap-shot’ system level simulations of an LTE system where the physical resource allocation, modulation and coding scheme selection and retransmissions are modelled. The impact on the LTE delay is analyzed for different granularities of LTE resource allocation, for both urban and suburban environments. The results show that the impact of LTE resource allocation granularity on delay performance is more visible at lower number of nodes per cell. Different environments (with different inter-site distances) have limited impact to the delay performance. In general, it is challenging to reach a target maximum delay of 1 s in realistic LTE deployments (This work is partly funded by the FP7 SUNSEED project, with EC grant agreement no: 619437.). © ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2017

Power control with antenna array processing for UMTS

The benefits of employing antenna array processing for the interference limited UMTS system is the increase in the number of simultaneous users and the reduction in the transmitted uplink power. The joint power control and antenna processing offers maximum achievable capacity with lower transmission powers for the given target SINR (signal-to-interference+noise ratio). The analysis about possible achievements using antenna array processing, varying parameters such as the number of users in a microcell, processing gain and antenna array size for the given target SINR, has been done using a deterministic ray tracing model developed for urban microcells and considering two antenna processing cases, OC (optimum combining) and MRC (maximum ratio combining). The paper shows that the ratio between the target value and the processing gain is the most dominant factor for the antenna array performance in the power controlled environment, and that optimum transmitted powers obtained using OC are the least sensitive to the increase in the number of users, as compared to MRC and simple decorrelation on a single antenna element