A Real Time Power Update Scheme for the Smart Grid Using TVWS

Abstract

The U.S. electrical power grid is going through a major transformation from the traditional centralized, failure prone system to an intelligent, resilient, and less-centralized grid that facilitates two-way flow of energy and information. The smart grid is conceived to have the ability to adopt technologies covering the areas of sensing, wireless connectivity, pervasive computing and adaptive control to significantly improve the efficiency. Tremendous amount of data is being used by different utilities today in the U.S. This led us to explore new spectrum bands and better spectrum management beyond what is available today. In this paper, we analyze various schemes that use the IEEE 802.11af TV white space (TVWS) spectrum to employ power saving channel access mechanism. We also propose a smart real-time power update algorithm with minimal power overhead using the TVWS. Next, we implement a MAC layer scheduling algorithm for wireless Community Area Network (CAN) system to reduce collision rate and transmission delay of smart meters to a utility base station in a neighborhood. Through detailed simulations, we show that the proposed scheme offers intelligent real-time power updates to power facilities with minimal power overhead.