NeTS: Small: Collaborative Research: Scalability and Reliability for Network Communication Infrastructure in Smart Grid

作为整个智能电网路线图的第一个重要里程碑和基本步骤，先进的计量基础设施（AMI）是一个系统，它可以感知、收集和分析来自智能电表的能源使用和电能质量数据，并根据要求或按计划与计量设备通信。尽管近年来对智能电网通信基础设施进行了许多研究，但智能电网AMI中通信体系结构的可扩展性和可靠性问题仍然没有得到很好的解决，尽管这是该领域最重要的两个问题。这些都严重阻碍了智能电网领域有效通信技术的开发和部署。此外，在理解智能电网AMI中可扩展性和可靠性的相互作用和权衡，以及设计最佳性能指标的知识库方面仍然存在很大的空白。本项目探讨了智能电网中新兴通信网络设计的挑战性问题，并研究了AMI中的可扩展性和可靠性及其相互作用。该研究旨在分析和设计广域网级先进计量基础设施的可扩展架构，并为节能自维持的邻域网络设计可靠的通信。方法包括识别和解决大数据量和不同通信需求下智能电网通信可扩展性和可靠性设计的新挑战，设计邻域网络优化部署的新算法，总结各种场景下可扩展和可靠的端到端智能电网通信的设计策略和原则。该项目引入了新颖的网络设计策略和原则，以实现可扩展和可靠的网络通信基础设施，可以实时处理大量AMI智能计量数据。本项目的研究工作将促进对智能电网网络通信基础设施领域的科学认识，并对可扩展、可靠的智能电网AMI系统的设计产生重大影响。该项目的成果将促进我们的社会向更加节能和可持续的未来过渡。该项目纳入了一项教育计划，旨在吸引代表性不足的学生。

As the first major milestone and the fundamental step of the overall smart grid roadmap, an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is a system that senses, collects and analyzes data on energy usage and power quality from smart meters, and communicates with metering devices on request or on schedule. In spite of many recent research activities on smart grid communication infrastructure, scalability and reliability of communication architectures in smart grid AMI are still not well-addressed yet, even though they are two of the most important issues in this field. These have seriously hampered the development and deployment of effective communication technologies to smart grid field. Moreover, there is still a critical gap in the knowledge base to understand the interactions and the tradeoffs of scalability and reliability, and to design the best performance metrics in smart grid AMI.This project investigates the challenging issues of emerging communication network design in smart grid, and study scalability and reliability aspects and their interactions in AMI. The proposed research aims at analysis and design of scalable architectures for advanced metering infrastructures in the wide area network level, and designs reliable communications for energy efficient self-sustaining neighborhood area networks. The approaches include identifying and addressing the new challenges in the scalability and reliability design for smart grid communications with a large amount of data and different communication requirements, designing novel algorithms for optimal deployment of neighborhood area networks, and summarizing design strategies and principles for scalable and reliable end-to-end smart grid communications under various scenarios. This project introduces novel network design strategies and principles to achieve scalable and reliable network communication infrastructure that can handle a tremendous amount of AMI smart metering data in real-time. The research efforts conducted in this project will advance scientific understanding in the field of network communication infrastructure in smart grid, and have a significant impact on the design of scalable and reliable smart grid AMI systems. The outcomes of the project will foster the transition of our society into a more energy efficient and sustainable future. The project incorporates an education plan that engages underrepresented students.