Supporting electro-mobility in an urban environment with the nomadic agent concept

The present work advances the use of the Nomadic Agent (NA) concept for supporting electro-mobility through the provision of location based information in an urban environment. In the envisaged system, each NA periodically broadcasts relevant data to other mobile nodes representing electric vehicles (EVs) inside its target area. At the same time, it is considered that multiple NAs are deployed to achieve full coverage throughout an urban area, establishing a chain among different NAs over a multi-hop communication network. Moreover, the NAs exchange information with EV charging posts that play the role of the aggregators in a smart grid, i.e. intermediate actors between the power system and the users. Hence, this communication platform can support value-added functionalities of EVs and their integration with the power system. As a first step towards the implementation of the envisaged system, this paper focuses on modeling the NA concept with the ns-3 discrete-event network simulator in order to assess its operation under realistic conditions. The results obtained from a small-scale simulation model, yet representative of the structural components of the urban web, indicate that the proposed approach has the potential to provide a suitable solution for the communications within the active area of the NA.