Smart Buildings For Smart Grids: A Real-world Testbed

At the heart of SG lie Smart Buildings (SB), which are the primary consumers of electrical energy. However, SBs are also expected to produce energy and contribute to stabilizing the Demand/Response (DR) variance. To achieve this, continuous data monitoring using wireless sensors and real-time dissemination/processing of data is essential. The deployment of context-awareness, where electrical appliances can be switched On/Off depending on context, would bring considerable added-value. The novelty in SG is that electricity flows in both directions, from the grid/production to end-users, and from end-users to the grid. End-users are becoming producers as well, and have the right to modify and customize their purchasing formulas at any time. The main purpose behind the concept of SG is to meter the energy consumption that is significantly increasing, and hence impacting the world both financially and environmentally. SG emerges to help solve this problem through having end-users control their consumption. Smart Buildings are the main components in SG, consuming most of the produced electrical energy. They offer a high level of comfort, high-power efficiency, and environmental friendliness through utilizing renewable sources of energy and efficient control systems. A network of wireless sensors and actuators is deployed in the smart building to bring all these features into place. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are the underlying smartness in SBs and eventually SGs, referring to a set of wirelessly connected sensors that sense and report information about the environment. The wireless communication technology opted for in this project is Zigbee, based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard. It is easy to deploy and provides a simple configuration that allows for an easy control and monitoring of home appliances remotely. The mesh (a.k.a, ad-hoc) topology is the most suitable for the ongoing project, mainly because of the ease-to-deploy and self-healing features. Wireless Mesh networks (WMN) are very solicited in ad-hoc deployments, which is the case in this project. The deployed testbed consists mainly of six components: Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Big Data Analytics Platform, Wireless Actuator Network, NI CompactRIO, Solar Parking Lot, and Storage. The central component is the NI CompactRIO, which decides on whether to inject the produced electricity into the grid or into the storage. The NI controller is fed with processed information from the Big Data Analytics Platform (BDAP), which is an HPC that processes collected big data from the underlying WSN. The BDAP implements context-awareness and instructs the wireless actuators to switch On/Off SB's electrical appliances depending on need. The Internet of Things (IoT) is being featured in many applications that require wireless devices to be connected to the Cloud. Smart Grids are one of the newest and most popular applications of IoT, focusing on the interaction with the environment rather than the interaction with human beings. The SG network, a.k.a., the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), is equipped with wireless sensing devices along with gateways forwarding the sensed data towards the processing unit, which is the BDAP in this case. This way, the SG AMI is mostly relying on the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for Data Acquisition. The implemented WSN has three types of nodes: the sender, which senses temperature and humidity in the environment and sends it; the intermediary node that forwards the sensed data from the source/sender to the destination; and the gateway which has two interfaces: a Zigbee interface, and a wired interface connecting it to the wired network where the BDAP lies. The hardware/software used to build the prototype includes Arduino Nano, Arduino Uno, DHT 11, and other components.