Performance evaluations of next generation networks for smart grid applications

Smart Grid (SG) can be described as the concept of modernizing the traditional electrical grid. Through the addition of SG technologies traditional electrical grids become more flexible, robust and interactive, and are able to provide real time feedback by employing innovative services and products together with communication, control, intelligent monitoring, and self-healing technologies. For being fully functional, utility operators deploy various SG applications to handle the key requirements including delivery optimization, demand optimization and asset optimization needs. The SG applications can be categorized into two main classes: grid-focused applications and customer-focused applications. Although these applications differ in terms of security, Quality of Service (QoS) and reliability, their common requirement is a communication infrastructure. In this paper, we focus on the use of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) for SG applications. We also present a detailed analysis of a NGN-based communication infrastructure for SG applications in terms of global network statistics and node-level statistics.