Integration of Cloud-Fog Based Environment with Smart Grid

Smart grid (SG) is an efficient electrical grid that provides opportunities to manage the energy load in a reliable and efficient way. Moreover, smart meters (SMs) are introduced, which play a vital role in communication between homes and SG. SMs manage and monitor the energy consumption of homes. SGs and SMs produce a big data, which is very hard to store and process even with cloud computing. For this purpose fog computing concept is introduced, which provides a good environment for computing and storing the data of SGs and SMs before transmitting them to cloud. The concept of fog computing, acts as a bridge between cloud and SGs. In this paper, a cloud-fog based architecture is integrated with SG for efficient energy management of buildings with SMs. To manage the energy requirements of consumers, micro grids (MGs) are available near to the buildings. Fogs are distributed over the world, overhaul the cloud via important features, including low latency and increased security for MGs. To balance the load on cloud and fogs, three load balancing algorithms are used. These algorithms are round robin (RR), throttled and greedy. Closest datacenter policy is used to compare their results. Greedy gives better results than RR and throttled.