A novel embedded system-based backbone communication network for smart grid

A smart grid is a modernized power grid. Many novel technologies have been used to smart grids. One of the technologies is the wireless sensor network. In this study, a novel backbone communication network is proposed, which combines two different wireless technologies (the ZigBee and Wi-Fi protocol), to form a communication network between the transmission towers in a power grid. The gateway in the network consists of an embedded system and an AP with long-range communication capability. The embedded system is used as a computing platform to deal with sensor readings transmitted through the ZigBee protocol and routing data transmitted between towers via long-range Wi-Fi. Finally, the gateways relay the readings to a back-end server in a monitoring center (e.g. substation, ADCC, and CDCC) through the backbone communication network. Furthermore, to manage all the gateways, a routing algorithm for the backbone communication network is designed to ensure the reliability of data transmission in this study. Simulation is done to test the effectiveness and reliability of the routing algorithm. Although other papers have shown architectures and algorithms for smart grid, they are not proper for power grid in Taiwan due to the distribution of transmission lines. This study proposes an embedded system-based backbone communication network for power grid in Taiwan.