feasibility study of utilizing mobile communications for smart grid applications in urban area
DESCRIPTION
Presentation shown in IEEE SmartGridComm 2014 by Seppo Horsmanheimo, VTT Technical Research Center of FinlandTRANSCRIPT
Presentation Outline
1. Background
2. Previous work
3. Urban wireless communications
4. Field trials and results
5. Conclusion and future work
Background
• Storm Patrick, which swept over the
Scandinavian peninsula in
26.12.2011.
• The worst storm in 30 years and
caused ~ 60 M€ damages to
energy companies in Finland.
• In some regions, power and mobile
connections were out of order for
two weeks.
• After the storm, Finnish government
tightened regulations concerning
communication and electricity
distribution networks’ reliability.
Scope of Electricity Distribution Network
Figure from Viola Systems’ ‘Case Vattenfall: Automating the Distribution Network’ report
Network Planning Tool (NPT)
Critical Technologies Towards 5G
Mo
de
llin
g
Me
as
ure
me
nts
P
erf
orm
an
ce
As
se
ss
me
nt
Fa
ult
Sim
ula
tio
ns
Fault Analysis One feeder down
*) Gray indicates network entities without electricity.
Downlink redundancy rasters
One substation down Several substations down
*) Color indicates the redundancy of 2G networks
Modelling of Urban Communication
• Urban mobile networks differ from rural mobile networks
– Networks are capacity limited rather than coverage limited (small cell size)
– Base station antennas are below rooftops or indoors. Buildings, walls, and
ceilings are shadowing the radio signal and causing multi-path effects
– More radio access technologies and operators available
• Mobile operators have taken different strategies in the deployment of
GSM/UMTS/LTE networks.
• Outdoor measurements and available indoor prediction models do not
give an accurate picture about indoor communication conditions (e.g. in
basement).
Analysis of Urban Area Grid Communication
Communication
network
3D terrain and
buildings
Coverage prediction fine-tuned
with measurements
Electricity
Network
Indoor measurements
• Three different types of indoor
environments were selected
– Old vs new building
– First floor vs basement
– Short vs long distance from a
BTS
• A mobile robot was used
indoors to provide the locations
for the measurement samples.
• Lidar and camera was used to
construct a 2D/3D model of
buildings’ interiors.
Critical Technologies Towards 5G
Indoor Measurement
Figure. Measurement in GSM, UMTS, LTE and WLAN networks. The red
circles illustrate handover locations.
Network latency (1 / 4)
• Network latency is one of
the key parameters.
• IEC 61850 standard
defines stringent
requirements for the
latency.
• LTE is reported to fulfill
the classes P4 – P6 (slow
automatic interactions).
Critical Technologies Towards 5G
Picture from Ericsson’s white paper “LTE for utilities”, 2013
Conclusion
• Operators have taken different strategies to deploy different radio access technologies (LTE-800/1800, GSM-900/1800, UMTS-900/2100, and WiFi-2.4/5.0) especially indoors.
• Changes in the radio environment are more vivid in urban areas due to the shadowing of buildings and the use of lower antenna heights.
• Indoor coverage prediction is challenging. It requires detailed information about building’s interiors.
• In addition to availability and reliability, latency is also a key parameter. It is affected by the network load and connection activity. The mobile network tends to release radio resources if the connection is not active.
Future work
• Performing LTE-800 field trials in rural and urban areas.
• Evaluating latencies with different packet sizes and
transmission intervals.
• Testing GOOSE traffic over a wireless link, and parallel
multi-operator and multi-RAN links to increase reliability.
• Studying new features of LTE (rel 12 and 13) to reduce
latency and to increase reliability and robustness.
– SON (Self-organizing networks) to minimize fault effects
– ProSe (Proximity Services for Public Safety) for reliability
– SDN (Software Defined Networks) for network virtualization