A cyber-physical system framework for smart grid wireless communications

Wireless communications have been widely deployed to collect and disseminate data for industrial applications. However, to date the mostly accepted technologies for information collection and dissemination in power grid are still based on wired communications instead of wireless. To leverage the advantages of wireless communications for smart grid, proper wireless networks need to be designed to satisfy the specific service requirements of power grid. Considering the diverse service requirements in different applications of power grid, the design of a wireless network is usually application-specific. So far no systematic approach is available to guide the design of smart grid wireless networks. To this end, a systematic approach is developed in this paper to provide guidelines for smart grid wireless communications. It is based on the framework of cyber-physical system (CPS). Under this framework, a smart grid wireless communication system is categorized into either a loosely-coupled or closely-coupled CPS, considering different mechanisms of interaction between a wireless network and power grid. For either CPS, general procedures of wireless network design are proposed by considering the service requirements and unique features of such a CPS. To illustrate how these design procedures are applied in reality, two application scenarios are presented to demonstrate smart grid wireless communications based on loosely-coupled CPS and closely-coupled CPS, respectively.