Telecommunication Networks for Smart Grids Deployment

摘要

As smart grids begin to emerge, electrical utilities start incorporating a lot more machine to machine(M2M) communications, required to interconnect the different elements of the grid, and remotelycontrol them in a smart manner.The current situation is that thousands of new devices are being deployed in order to provide anelectrical power system economically efficient and sustainable, low-loss, high quality, and highavailability and security of supply.The present and future ICT industry will play a critical role in the development of smart energyinfrastructures, enabling new functionality while reducing costs. The objective of this paper is toanalyze telecommunication networks for smart grids deployment from different points of view:standardization, technologies, services, processes and security.The development and adoption of open standards in ICT is an effective strategy for maximisinginteroperability, competitiveness and innovation. For instance, TR-069 is a standard protocol fromBroadband Forum, which allows remote management, monitoring and control of many types ofdevices. Although the SGAM (Smart Grids Architecture Model), which is the European evolution ofthe American conceptual model (NIST), defines a complete framework based on five zones anddomains as well as five interoperability dimensions, the reality of the projects being deployed is quitedifferent.From the telecommunications point of view, there’s a border physically located in the secondarysubstation (MV/LV). From this site downstream, the communication technology most commonly usedis Power Line Communication (PLC) narrowband, following the ITU-T G.9904 standard. From thissite upstream, quite a few technologies are being used like Broadband Power Line (BPL),GPRS/UMTS, DSL, optical fibre, cable and some others. Telecommunication networks for the smartgrid have some unique constraints which determine both the design and network management.From the point of view of the services carried by the network, there’s a tremendous heterogeneity.Some services are focused on metering, while others are focused on monitoring power line quality,control, balancing, or even increasing service availability whenever a fault occurs by using remotecontrol. Deployment of AMI’s projects (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) is being the key factor inthe construction of new telecommunication networks related to the Smart Grids.The diversity of services needed results in different telecommunication requirements. As a result ofthis, telecommunication network designs should be adapted to different needs such as traffic flows,capacity, latency, jitter, and availability, quite different between services.Due to the mix of technologies, protocols, and networks involved (private, public, electrical), a globalmanagement system is needed, capable of correlating events, integrating information from differentsources, even from public service providers. The need of these systems forces the concentration ofsuppliers. The operation system must include functionalities related to inventory, monitoring, networkmanagement and reporting.However, there’re some key processes for which the system must offer support. These processes aredevice self commissioning, massive changes implementation, and device replacement due tocorrective activities. It’s mandatory to have the tools that support these processes in order to simplifynetwork deployment, to reduce the costs related to it and to exploitation of the network, but also toensure network changes due to modifications of the service required.In fact, when deploying these networks, we must think in terms of integrating all the processes, so thecommunication infrastructure becomes an extension of the rest. Furthermore, these processes facilitatesecurity service, by making provision as a centralized and uniform process.When dealing with sensitive information associated with critical infrastructures, security becomes veryimportant. Integrity, availability, obedience, authentication, and encryption should be analyzed indetail. Although all of them must be taken into account, availability, obedience and authenticationshould be prioritized over integrity and encryption. In fact, some protocols have integrity inherently byusing CRC by default like Ethernet. At the end, when talking about security, it becomes as importantthe technical design, as the security management itself.