Using an overlay network to manage the renewable energy in residential areas

We propose a P2P overlay network that works as a communication infrastructure for the applications of Smart Grid to monitor and control the intelligent electric devices in Power Grid. This paper also includes a case where the power flows in the residential areas are managed by a mechanism implemented on top of this overlay network. The peer nodes of the overlay network are the computers. These computers construct into an overlay network that has the structure of the R-tree (used by some spatial databases for indexing its objects) through mapping to the tree nodes. They take over the intelligent devices in the geographic area around their own locations by communicating with them using the devices´ protocols. In our case study, these peer nodes run the procedures of the energy management mechanism to manage the power flows in their geographic areas. Our simulation results show that, using the overlay network, the energy generated by the distributed generators is effectively shared by the homes at the different times of day. The paper also present the simulation results showing the properties of the overlay network, including the scalability in terms of the stretch of the path between a peer node and the control center. For the case of churn, the experiment results indicate that the number of split or merge depends on the parameters that the overlay network has.