Communication Requirements and Deployment Challenges of Cloudlets in Smart Grid

Abstract

Intelligent and distributed power networks are becoming more complex with the addition of cloudlets infrastructure. This paper is the initial output of a Low Latency Edge Containerisation and Virtualisation project at PNDC. This project investigates the performance and communication requirements of deploying edge computing devices to enable low-latency applications. The edge network illustrates how additional intelligent network resources can help realise betterdistributed automation and remote configuration in smart grids. With cloudlets, the performance of smart grid networks will be enhanced in terms of low latency, higher bandwidth, and other network requirements. This paper presents cloudlets technology's current state of the art, including network design requirements, implementation techniques, and integration challenges with the legacy power networks. It also explored the main challenges of processing smart grid data by constrained IoT devices. The feasibility of using edge containers to provide low latency communication to several critical end applications in the smart grid could improve the performance of the networks. Furthermore, the key use cases of cloudlets in critical end applications for power utility networks were identified