The design of an experimental model for deploying home area network in smart grid

Abstract

In the smart power grid, designing an efficient and reliable communication architecture has an important role in improving efficiency, and maintaining the connectivity of different network components. The home area network (HAN) provides an energy management system in houses since it enables home energy control and monitoring. So, it is imperative to determine a HAN configuration that provides low cost and better performance. We propose in this paper a conceptual and experimental model for designing a wireless sensor network to monitor a HAN in a Smart Grid. The novelty of this study is that it considers real object and network configuration. The use of ZigBee standard for wireless communication requires a meticulous physical and logical design to overcome limitations related to nodes density, traffic load by PAN, network topology and motion pattern. The current study allows us to characterize the best configuration of the intelligent studied system and to provide a perspective on addressing the problem of a node failure.