At present, the standardisation of electrical equipment communications is on the rise. In particular, manufacturers are releasing equipment for the smart grid endowed with communication protocols such as DNP3, IEC 61850, and MODBUS. However, there are legacy equipment operating in the electricity distribution network that cannot communicate using any of these protocols. Thus, we propose an infrastructure to allow the integration of legacy electrical equipment to smart grids by using wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this infrastructure, each legacy electrical device is connected to a sensor node, and the sink node runs a middleware that enables the integration of this device into a smart grid based on suitable communication protocols. This middleware performs tasks such as the translation of messages between the power substation control centre (PSCC) and electrical equipment in the smart grid. Moreover, the infrastructure satisfies certain requirements for communication between the electrical equipment and the PSCC, such as enhanced security, short response time, and automatic configuration. The paper’s contributions include a solution that enables electrical companies to integrate their legacy equipment into smart-grid networks relying on any of the above mentioned communication protocols. This integration will reduce the costs related to the modernisation of power substations.
SummaryTo improve the efficiency of electricity distribution, smart grids allow communication between their devices. Pieces of legacy equipment operating in the distribution network do not communicate using any commercial protocol, such as DNP3, IEC 61850, or Modbus. Thus, herein, a middleware is proposed to allow the integration of the legacy electrical equipment into a smart grid using wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Each piece of legacy electrical equipment is connected to a sensor node, and the WSN sink node runs a middleware to enable the integration of this device with a smart grid, according to the commercial communication protocols. The middleware model is proposed to guide users in the development of a WSN-based system for integrating electrical equipment into a smart grid. The middleware was validated in a real environment, which is related to the concept of power metering. Experiments were performed using the software supervisory control and data acquisition and distributed test manager to validate the communication between the electrical equipment and the computer of the power substation control centre.
Currently, electricity distributors make use of various types of equipment divided into levels of automation. This automation enables the integration of elements such as Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) to the supervision of the distribution electrical system, but there is not an appropriate environment to increase the scale of these elements. In this context, the smart grid comes with specifications that allow adding new elements to the intelligence of the power grid operation. However, the cost of communication is still an impediment to the scalability of the integration of these elements into the current structure. In this paper, we propose a middleware that optimizes the communication of this integration using wireless sensor networks (WSN). The goal is to ensure a gradual integration of new elements taking advantage of the increase in the number of sensor nodes in the network due to the scalability of the system itself. The conversion solutions have been used to allow easy communication between the WSN and the smart grid system, and we also have used data aggregation and compression techniques to increase the lifetime of the wireless sensor network.
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