A New Grouping Protocol for Smart Grids

Due to the deployment of renewable energy supplies in a smart grid (SG), various distributed power devices need to form groups dynamically to meet their requirements on power supply and demand. A communication agent or controller is coupled with each power device to exchange control state or management information with others. The underneath communication networks that enable the connections among the devices become to consist of many ad hoc groups with dynamic size and topology. Consequently, with dynamic requirement on power supply and demand, the grouping becomes a particularly challenging problem to synchronize the power devices, because the communication delays with dynamic group settings may vary frequently and significantly. In this paper, first, we propose queueing models to estimate the communication delays of the nodes in the SG. The cost of the added security to the communications is also analyzed in various scenarios. Second, we propose a smart timing adjustment algorithm with a new timing adaptive grouping (TAG) protocol, so that each agent can dynamically adjust its operational timing configuration and determine its grouping condition. Third, we develop a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed, which can be used to validate many SG applications. Finally, our experimental and simulation results on the HIL testbed have demonstrated that the proposed TAG protocol can be used to ensure the successful grouping dynamically.