Communication Technologies for Smart Grid: A Comprehensive Survey

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of communication technologies in smart grids, highlighting their requirements, architectures, and challenges to guide future research in this critical energy infrastructure component.

Contribution

It offers an up-to-date, detailed overview of communication methods and challenges specific to smart grid systems, aiding researchers in identifying future research directions.

Findings

Overview of physical layer technologies used in smart grids

Analysis of network architectures and their suitability

Identification of key research challenges in smart grid communications

Abstract

With the ongoing trends in the energy sector such as vehicular electrification and renewable energy, smart grid is clearly playing a more and more important role in the electric power system industry. One essential feature of the smart grid is the information flow over the high-speed, reliable and secure data communication network in order to manage the complex power systems effectively and intelligently. Smart grids utilize bidirectional communication to function where traditional power grids mainly only use one-way communication. The communication requirements and suitable technique differ depending on the specific environment and scenario. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date survey on the communication technologies used in the smart grid, including the communication requirements, physical layer technologies, network architectures, and research challenges. This survey aims to help the readers identify the potential research problems in the continued research on the topic of smart grid communications.