SGNI 2010 - The 1st Workshop on Smart Grid Networking Infrastructure (SGNI)

Economic development and its sustainability are closely coupled with the effective, efficient and robust use of the energy. Under an aging and ineffectual energy distribution system, unprecedented initiatives have recently been instituted in many countries to ameliorate the electric grid with the Smart Grid. The key facilitators of the Smart Grid are two-way energy and information flow between the suppliers and consumers. The conventional supply-chain of the energy is being expanded to include alternative sources of energy, such as solar, wind, tidal, biomass, etc. from a variety of distributed small and large energy producers. The consumers are becoming more active participants by means of such devices as smart meters, smart thermostats, smart appliances.

The grand vision of autonomic, self-healing Smart Grid with a dynamic demand response model with pricing still has many challenges, not the very least, from the perspective of the networking infrastructure and distributed computing. The sheer size of the contemplated Smart Grid of the future is to rival the Internet in the number of participants. The scalability, lack of standards for seamless integration of diverse equipment and devices, and missing features and applications to bring about the expected benefits are just beginning to get underway in the networking research community. The purpose of this workshop is to form a platform to exchange ideas among interested parties for the Smart Grid from the perspective of the networking infrastructure.

Topics of Interest

Original, unpublished and unsubmitted work is sought in terms of algorithms, techniques, architectures, position papers, visionary approaches and modeling to enable the resilient, reliable and secure Smart Grid. One of the main themes of the workshop is the real-time or near real-time communications with guarantees. When the number of devices, from smart appliances to the Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), and the possibilities of different technologies, especially for the last-mile, are considered, Quality-of-Service (QoS) provisioning becomes a challenging endeavor. Other focal points comprises security, data aggregation, Smart Grid monitoring and self-healing. Two-way information flow and the voluminous data to be generated by the Intelligent Electronic Devices (IED) are likely to put significant strains on the privacy and security of the data as well as its dissemination in the distributed setting as envisioned for the Smart Grid.

The workshop program invites papers on various aspects of the Smart Grid Networking topics including, but not limited to, the following:

Wireless communications for Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and for the Smart Grid last mile
Service-Oriented and QoS architectures (DiffServ, IntServ, MPLS, etc.) for Smart Grid
Security and QoS trade-offs in Smart Grid
Home Area Networking (HAN) technologies with smart meters (OpenHAN, sensors, Zigbee, etc.)
Secure and flexible data aggregation, privacy considerations, and network data anonymization
Mobility issues of maintenance and installation dispatch teams of the Smart Grid
Demand Response with dynamic pricing on a real-time (or near real-time) basis, such as Open Automated Demand Response (Open ADR)
Intelligent status monitoring, fault detection, isolation, self-healing, outage management, disaster prevention and recovery systems, real-time load balancing, dynamic discovery
Energy-efficient transmission switching and routing technologies for the Smart Grid infrastructure and communications
Neighborhood Area Networks (NAN) using wireless mesh networks
ANSI C12.22 and IP interoperability and other compatibility issues in the Smart Grid
Multicast and multicast data authentication for the Smart Grid
Wide area situational awareness (near real-time) monitoring and performance
Communications among Intelligent Electronic Devices (IED) and end-to-end IED services
QoS assurances for a wide range of applications (including NASPInet Class A, B, C, D) with different bandwidths, latency and reliability requirements
Next-generation Distributed Network Protocol (DNP3) and Inter-Control Center Protocol (ICCP)
Precision time synchronization protocols for the Smart Grid for real-time operation (Wide area time domain GPS synchronized sampling systems (WATSS) )
Wide area monitoring, protection, automation, communications, and control (WAMPACC) message exchange protocols, Wide Area Measurement System (WAMS), SCADA
Networked Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) for wide-area monitoring and forensics of the Smart Grid disturbances
Transport layer mechanisms for PMU high streaming data applications, such as Stream Control Transport Protocol (SCTP)
Disseminating power grid status information within and between power utilities
Middleware for E2E guarantees for WAMPAC applications