Cognitive Radio based Smart Grid Networks

The conventional power grid has several drawbacks and a new powerful Smart Grid perspective has been recently introduced. The Smart Grid principle, allowing to efficiently manage an electrical grid network, needs to exploit a communication network for interconnecting the Smart Grid devices. An increasing interest is toward wireless communications due to their higher flexibility. Within this context Cognitive Radio (CR) techniques has been introduced aiming to exploit more efficiently the radio spectrum resources; to this aim CR based Smart Grids will be reviewed as a possible solution for implementing an effective Smart Grid Network. Furthermore, a set of new methods will be introduced to solve some challenges introduced by CR based Smart Grids.