Wireless communication role in Home Energy Management system (HEMS)

Smart homes and smart grids become today an efficient approach to face the problem of energy shortage. For example Egypt is now facing a huge problem of fuel shortage. The power stations fail to supply power to millions of electricity users. As a result the power station cuts the power on a specific district for a certain time without considering the unfair distribution of power. A Home Energy Management (HEM) system integrates the concept of Smart homes and Smart grids. This of course needs a reliable and efficient communication system that can transfer full data scheme for customer load behavior during the day 24 hours. This work proposes a prototype for a communication system that deals with this problem through implementing a web based communication link between a power manager and the heavy loads of each customer. The channel between customers and the power manager was analyzed by simulation also. A prototype of the system was completely designed, built and tested in the laboratory and the early results confirm the expected performance.