Cognitive Radio Network for Smart Grid

Recently, Cognitive radio and Smart Grid are two areas which have received considerable research impetus. Cognitive radios are fully programmable wireless devices that can sense their environment, and dynamically adapt their transmission waveform, channel access method, spectrum use, and networking protocols. It is widely anticipated that cognitive radio technology will become a general-purpose programmable radio that will serve as a universal platform for wireless system development, much like microprocessors have served a similar role for computation. The salient features of the cognitive radio, namely, frequency agility, transmission speed, and range, are ideal for application to the smart grid. In this regard, a Cognitive Radio network can serve as a robust and efficient communications infrastructure that can address both the current and future energy management needs of the smart grid. The Cognitive radio network can be deployed as a large scale Wireless Regional Area Network (WRAN) in a smart grid, to utilize the unused TV bands recently approved for use by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) In addition, a Cognitive Radio network testbed for the smart grid would serve as an ideal platform to not only address various issues related to the smart grid, such as security, information flow and power flow management, etc., but also reveal more practical problems for further research. In this chapter, the novel concept of incorporating a cognitive radio network as the communications backbone for the smart grid is outlined. A brief overview of the cognitive radio is provided, including the recently proposed IEEE 802.22 standard. In particular, an overview of Cognitive Radio Network testbed, existing and new hardware platforms for