Smart grid communications in challenging environments

Smart grid is an emerging solution to the aging power grid with increasing electricity power demand. Smart grid takes advantages of two-way communications and the technologies in sensing, computing, and control. While smart grid has drawn the attention of research communities, power companies, as well as power consumers, it is confronted with great challenging for the deployment at the same time, e.g., in mobile environment, geographical environment and harsh climatic environment. In this paper, we discuss the issues related to the challenging smart grid deployment environments and existing solutions for such environments. We also propose to deploy cognitive radios for smart grid communication infrastructures in challenging environments. Specifically we propose a hybrid smart grid communication framework based on cognitive radio networks. We analyze the performance of proposed communication scheme and prove the efficiency of adapting cognitive radio networks to smart grid communication infrastructures.