The Monitoring Network Architecture in the Neighbourhood Area of the Smart Grid

The Smart Grid has three main characteristics, which are to some degree antagonistic. These characteristics are: provision of good power quality, energy cost reduction and improvement in the reliability of the grid. The need to ensure that they can be accomplished together demands a much richer ICT monitoring and control network than the current system, which is centrally controlled. In this paper we discuss our design choices for building a communication network alongside the power network. We examine the existing communication technologies and justify our choice for selecting one of these technologies as the most appropriate method of communication in our proposed architecture. We focus particularly on the neighbourhood area sub-grid. Since visualisation tools for monitoring the neighbourhood area of the power grid are currently lacking, we present a visualisation tool we have developed for this system.