A review of cognitive radio smart grid communication infrastructure systems

Abstract

The cognitive smart grid (SG) communication paradigm aims to mitigate quality of service (QoS) issues in obsolete communication architecture associated with the conventional electrical grid. This paradigm entails the integration of advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) into power grids, enabling a two-way flow of information. However, due to the exponential increase in wireless applications and services, also driven by the deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) smart devices, SG communication systems are expected to handle large volumes of data. As a result, the operation of SG networks is confronted with the major challenge of managing and processing data in a reliable and secure manner. The existing works in the literature proposed architectures with the objective to mitigate the underlying QoS issues such as latency, bandwidth, data congestion, energy efficiency, etc. In addition, a variety of communication technologies have been analyzed for their capacity to support stringent QoS requirements for diverse SGs environments. This notwithstanding, a standard architecture designed to mitigate the aforementioned issues for SG networks remains a work-in-progress. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the emerging technologies such as cognitive radio networks (CRNs) as part of the Fifth-Generation (5G) mobile technology for reliable communication in SG networks. Furthermore, a hybrid architecture based on the combination of fog computing and cloud computing is proposed. In this architecture, real-time latency-sensitive information is given high priority, with fog edge based servers deployed in close proximity to home area networks (HANs) for preprocessing and analyzing of information collected from smart IoT devices. In comparison to the recent works in the literature, which are mainly based on CRNs and 5G separately, the proposed architecture in this paper incorporates the combination of CRNs and 5G for reliable and efficient communication in SG networks.