Managing communications complexity in the smart grid using data aggregation

The smart grid will deliver electricity from suppliers to consumers using digital technology to save energy, reduce cost and increase reliability and transparency. The realization of the smart grid requires the modernization of the control system that governs the electricity supply process. The power grid will be instrumented with thousands of new digital control devices, sensors, and smart meters. Although the introduction of these technologies will bring many benefits to the control of the power networks, it will add more complexity to the communications. These new control entities will generate a huge amount of data and consume a portion of the communication bandwidth that may be needed for other control operations. In this paper we propose to use data aggregation techniques that allow reducing the communication overhead resulting from the introduction of the wireless sensor networks. We show that by using data aggregation functions, the communication traffic generated by smart sensors can be reduced, hence saving precious transmission bandwidth for other control operations.