Evaluation of ZigBee communication platform for controlling the charging of PHEVs at a municipal parking deck

Large penetration of plug in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) poses a potential threat to grid stability if PHEV battery charging is not managed. Thus there is a need of enabling technologies for control of PHEV battery charging. A critical component of such a system is the communication between the PHEV batteries and a central controller which we call the intelligent energy management system (iEMS). In this paper we describe the system architecture with ZigBee as the communication medium, followed by an experimental setup to demonstrate the iEMS with ZigBee communication. Our future work is to measure delay, throughput, received signal strength etc. to characterize the communication link and quantify its effect on iEMS performance.