Evaluating Content-centric Communication Over Power Line Communication Infrastructure for Smart Grids

Electricity management systems are being in the center of a major research effort aiming at developing its new generation known as SMART GRID. The novelty in smart grids is a two-way data flow added on top of the classic electricity flow. This information traffic is the reason behind the smartness of the new power management system qualified to be more efficient, more secure and more reliable than its predecessor. In consequence, well-tailored communication architecture with particular necessary characteristics for smart grids is needed. Our motivation behind this work is to assess the adequacy of an emergent communication paradigm referred to as content-centric networking to smart grids. Our first contribution is confronting smart grid communication system requirements with content-centric networking principles in order to theoretically justify our position. Our second contribution is a simulation of smart grid communications using smart grid network topology and data traffic. A content-centric communication solution is deployed to achieve data networking and is compared to the Internet protocol stack allowing us to witness packet delivery delay reduction and better congestion control ability in addition to an increased throughput.