@article{872ffa8f21d74c068569b71c28971d70,
title = "For the grid and through the grid: The role of power line communications in the smart grid",
abstract = "Are Power Line Communications (PLC) a good candidate for Smart Grid applications? The objective of this paper is to address this important question. To do so, we provide an overview of what PLC can deliver today by surveying its history and describing the most recent technological advances in the area. We then address Smart Grid applications as instances of sensor networking and network control problems and discuss the main conclusions one can draw from the literature on these subjects. The application scenario of PLC within the Smart Grid is then analyzed in detail. Because a necessary ingredient of network planning is modeling, we also discuss two aspects of engineering modeling that relate to our question. The first aspect is modeling the PLC channel through fading models. The second aspect we review is the Smart Grid control and traffic modeling problem which allows us to achieve a better understanding of the communications requirements. Finally, this paper reports recent studies on the electrical and topological properties of a sample power distribution network. Power grid topological studies are very important for PLC networking as the power grid is not only the information source but also the information delivery systema unique feature when PLC is used for the Smart Grid.",
keywords = "Cyber-physical systems, power grid, power line channel, power line communications (PLC), smart grid",
author = "Stefano Galli and Anna Scaglione and Zhifang Wang",
note = "Funding Information: Manuscript received May 28, 2010; revised September 12, 2010; accepted October 20, 2010. Date of current version May 17, 2011. The work of A. Scaglione and Z. Wang was funded in part by the UIUC TCIP Project under the Grant NSF CNS 0524695, and in part by the TCIPG Project which is sponsored by the Department of Energy under Award Number DE-OE0000097. S. Galli was with Panasonic Corporation. He is now with ASSIA, Inc., Redwood City, CA 94065 USA (e-mail: sgalli@assia-inc.com). A. Scaglione is with the University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616 USA (e-mail: ascaglione@ucdavis.edu). Z. Wang is with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801 USA (e-mail: zfwang@illinois.edu). Funding Information: As NB-PLC started to be progressively successful, BB-PLC started to appear as wellVinitially for Internet access applications and successively for HAN and A/V applications. The first wave of interest into the use of BB-PLC for Internet access started in Europe when Nortel and Norweb Communications in the U.K. announced in 1997 that they had developed a technology to provide access service to residential customers via PLC [30]. Limited trials of broadband Internet access through PLs were conducted in Manchester and NorWeb prototypes were able to deliver data at rates around 1 Mb/s. However, higher than anticipated costs and growing EMC issues caused the early termination of the project in 1999. Other projects in Europe led by Siemens and Ascom encountered a similar fate. On the other hand, a multiyear project funded by the European Community (The Open PLC European Research Alliance, OPERA) led most of the recent research efforts in the field of BB-PLC for Internet access [31].",
year = "2011",
month = jun,
doi = "10.1109/JPROC.2011.2109670",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "99",
pages = "998--1027",
journal = "Proceedings of the IEEE",
issn = "0018-9219",
publisher = "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.",
number = "6",
}