A Realities Model Simulation Platform of Wireless Home Area Network in Smart Grid

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A Realities Model Simulation Platform of Wireless Home Area Network in Smart Grid

Liang Yujie
School of Electronic, Information and Electrical Engineering Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai, China e-mail: naughtyegg@sjtu.edu.cn

Liu Peilin
School of Electronic, Information and Electrical Engineering Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai, China e-mail: liupeilin@sjtu.edu.cn

Liu Jing
School of Electronic, Information and Electrical Engineering Shanghai Jiao Tong University Shanghai, China e-mail: jingliu_lj@sjtu.edu.cn

AbstractSmart Grid is gradually prevalent to humans daily life. More customers hope their home grids smarter to realize energy saving, intelligent controlling and real-time monitoring. The advent of Home Area Network (HAN) supported by multiple IEEE network technologies makes the thinking true together with difficulties and challenges on the field designs and assignments. Simulation is important for analysis of a complex and harsh network environment in order to provide the performances of it. In this paper, we research on several realities models to develop an enhanced simulation platform to analysis the network performances of a real smart home grid which can advise a field engineer how to build a grid network or make it more reliable and effective. Keywords- simulation platform; smart home grid; Home Area Network; ZigBee

characters for a long time and must spend much time on trying various assignments of a HAN.
Simulation gives the behavior of the network and the various applications and services it supports in which various attributes of the environment can also be modified in a controlled manner to assess how the network would behave under different conditions [3]. Simulation is used to predict the performance of a wireless network's architecture, protocol, device, topology, etc [2].

In this paper, we propose a platform to simulate real scenarios (villa, office, workshop, etc) which have different structures and deployments just with simply and quickly parameters inputting. A series of function blocks and models have been developed to obtain the realities performances analysis. The famous advantages are shown as follow. Simple user interface User interface is an important estimation for application software. The simple and convenience nature of the usage will make the software widely used by person on all levels. Various link losses of realities radio propagations The radio propagation model used in the simulators is just free-space path loss (FSPL). In real network, many impact factors such as multipath loss, obstruction declining should be considered. Limit of hardware performances The hardware performances have not been considered in the simulators. Actually, the limit of hardware highly impact on the simulation results. For example, flow- control is one of the limits occurred by the resources of wireless MCU which will make the sending traffic can not increase infinitely. Variable user traffic

I.

INTRODUCTION

Traditional electrical grid has been used for almost a century. In home using, growing customer demands, equipments aging, and shortage of energy resources require a revolution in the grid [1]. A new concept of smart home grid has emerged which is the application of Smart Grid in home buildings. The technology of Home Area Network (HAN) is integrated in the home grid which realizes device-to-device information exchange. Unlike the wired communication, IEEE wireless network technologies require no expensive and strenuous cables installation which supports a cost-effective controlling and real-time monitoring system. As the convenience of intelligent wireless controlling, the employment of HANs also brings some new challenges and opportunities. Growing device nodes in a HAN will increase the scale of a wireless network and the existence of various obstructions will deteriorate the links quality. In practical using, many field engineers have puzzled by these undefined

978-1-4244-6255-1/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

The traffic models provided by the simulators have some limits which are not well described the real one. More traffic types, multiple destinations should be added to discuss. These four aspects decrease the difficulty of software using and realize the simulation of a real system. All these will benefit the engineers doing field design of a HAN or estimating the behaviors of an exiting network. II. A DESCRIPTION OF SIMULATION PLATFORM

Prair = Pt Gt Gr 4d

(1)

A single obstruction can decline the signal intensity only one time. So through the measurement of different obstructions, a single obstruction model can be set up. In an office, the concentrated distribution of desks requires a large amount of declining calculation. In view of the distances between every two desks are equal and the decline value of one desk is fixed, the declining through desks array is related to the distance. So the reception power through desks is
Prdesk = Prair + d K D

The simulation platform developed for network performances analysis of smart home grids is divided into three parts: user interface, model API and assistant software. Fig. 1 shows the system diagram of a model simulation platform.

(2)

(a)

Figure 1. System diagram of model simulation platform

A. User Interface User interface is a convenient data-exchange between platform and users. No need of professional knowledge, a user can only input architecture drawing, device installations and user operation requirements. The simply usage will make the platform suitable to all users. Through data calculation, statistics and analysis, the network performances of the grids can be obtained, including control latency, average network hops, packet reception rate, network structure or so on, which are changeable with different conditions. B. Model API Model API is exacted from a series of experiments in various examples. With characters abstraction of the key factors, we set up Propagation Model (RPM), Scenario Model (SM), Traffic Model (TR) and Hardware Model (HM). It is used TI CC2530 test bench to carry out the field measurement. 1) Radio Propagation Model (RPM) RPM describes the characters of communication channel. Radio propagation will bring the signal kinds of transmission loss, declining and multipath fading. In real systems, there are numerous obstructions such as partition, wall, brick and large device which will affect the radio propagation of signal. So a semi-empirical method is adopted to set up the RPM. Three kinds of RPMs are discussed as follow. When the medium is air, the radio propagation is referred to that in free-space. According to FSPL, the equation for the reception power with radio propagation through air is

(b)

(c) Figure 2. Building achitectrue and electrical installation drawing in a villa

2) Scenario Model (SM) SM provides the information of device positions, obstruction types and positions in a scenario. As the users inputs are just the professional drawings, the model should calculate the propagation path between devices or the type and number of obstructions in this path. To avoid large amount of work implemented by the software, the radio propagation should be optimized to cut off the impossible communications. 3) Traffic Model (TM)

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User traffic is not fixed in various applications. Traffic model provides a large database to record the user traffic which will changed by different people. The information of user traffic required for the simulation consists of frame length, device type (transmission node or reception one), operation frequency, etc. 4) Hardware Model (HM) In practical using, the hardware does not have infinite resources which will increase the limit conditions of simulation. So flow control mechanism described in HM should be added to make the simulation results close to the real ones. Each layer of protocol has its own flow control mechanism which is related to different hardware platforms. C. Assistant Software OPNET Modeler is selected as the assistant software the engine of which is a finite state machine model in combination with an analytical model. It has strong adaptation skills which can make the coordinate positions importing convenient to create a scenario and professional functions of data collecting and analyzing. The statistic parameters of each layer can be corrected directly which makes drawing conclusion convenient [4]. In this paper, ZigBee is selected as the wireless technology to give an example for platform using [6], [7], [8], [9]. III. MODELING A REAL SYSTEM

As shown in TABLE I, it is assumed 12 possible traffic sources delivering commands in unicast way and the operating interval should be larger than 100ms which is selected as packet inter-arrival time of each traffic source, and then the corresponding network load is 10packets/s. The performances need to be concerned are changed by the number of traffic sources and various packet inter-arrival times.
TABLE II. OBSTRUCTION DECLINING VALUE Declining Value (dB) 12.9 18.7 3.4 6.9

Obstruction Type Crossing through one floor Crossing through two floors Wall I (thickness<10cm) Wall II (thickness10cm)

In the villa, three kinds of obstructions exit including floor, Wall I (thickness<10cm) and Wall II (thickness 10cm) the declining values of which are shown in TABLE II. IV. WHAT PERFORMANCES CAN BE GET

A villa example is given which has the characters of large area coverage, plenty rooms composition and multi-storey structure. The villa is a 3-storey building incorporating 300m2 of living space. The size of each storey is 12m8m and the height is 3m. Fig. 2 shows the electrical assignment of each storey. The villa consists of 3 bedrooms, 3 living rooms and some spaces for other functions with at most 6 persons living. Using the scenario model, the construction drawing and electrical assignment is transformed into the network one.
TABLE I. Source G1 H1 I1 K1 G2 H2 I2 K2 M2 E3 F3 H3 PARAMETER OF USER OPERATION Destination A1,C1,D1 B1,E1,F1,J1 J1 J2,L2,N2,G3,I3 A2,C2,D2,E2,J2 B2,C2,D2,F2,L2 J2 L2 N2 A3,B3,C3,D3,G3 G3 I3 Operation Interval (s) 0.1 0.1

Simulation results output by the platform includes control latency, average network hops, traffic packets and reception rate. According to various demands of users, the results analysis can be focused on different aspects. Some of the normal performances are sampled as follows.

0.03

Control Latency (s)

0.02

0.01

0.00

G1

H1

I1

K1

G2

H2

I2

K2

M2

E3

F3

H3

Source Node

Figure 3. Control latency by different source under traffic of 10packets/s

0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1
Average Number of Hops
2

G1

H1

I1

K1

G2

H2

I2

K2

M2

E3

F3

H3

Source Node

Figure 4. Average hops by different source under traffic of 10packets/s

The control latency and the average number of hops corresponding to different traffic source node under fixed packet inter-arrival time are shown in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4. The control latency of every service transmission is between 16ms

and 32ms when the average network load is 10packets/s/soure, while the average number of hops is between 1.8 and 3.
100.0

99.8

Reception Rate (%)

99.6

99.4

dropped which will decline the effective sending rate and increase the difference value between these two packets. When one source exists and the operation interval time is 1s, the traffic packets at APS layer could be effectively sent to NWK layer. As the sources increases to 6, these packets could be sent to NWK layer successfully if the packet inter-arrival time is at most 0.5packets/s/source. If not, the traffic packets of the redundant operations will be dropped by APS data flow control. In conclusion, if the minimum interval is 100ms in a villa, one remote control can deliver single control commands without loss of control. And the control latency is no more than 32ms, within the toleration of human vision. If the operating interval keeps 100ms, it is allowed at most four remote controls in a villa to ensure the transmission correctly. Moreover, when 6 remote controls are enabled to deliver commands at the same time, the operating interval must be more than 2s, which will cause the latency of 17ms. And the average latency of all traffic is no more than 23ms. Otherwise, the operation to control the devices can not be guaranteed to be valid all the time. V. CONCLUSTION

99.2

99.0

Number of Sources

Figure 5. Reception rate by various number of sources under traffic of 10packets/s/source

10

Traffic Sent Effective Traffic

Traffic(packets/s)

10

Average Traffic (packets/s/source)

Figure 6. Total packets and effective sending packets by one source under variable traffic

70 60 50

A model simulation platform has been developed with models building to support the realistic network performances analysis of smart home grid. It can provide field engineers useful advices about network building, devices assignment or the other related. Simple user interface decrease the professional demands for users. Design by models makes the platform update more quickly and reliably which will keep in step with the development of Smart Grid. The model simulation platform also can be used in the industrial network or commercial one based on various network technology. To be close to the performances in practical using, more models should be considered which can benefit not only the field engineers but also the device manufacturers and network managements.

Traffic Sent Effective Traffic

Traffic(packets/s)

40 30 20 10 0

10

Average Traffic (packets/s/source)

REFERENCES
[1] Thomas F. Garrity, Getting SmartInnovation and Trends for Future Electric Power Systems, IEEE power & energy magzine, pp. 38-45, march/april 2008 M. S. Obaidat and D. B. Green, Simulation of wireless networks, Applied system simulation: methodologies and applications, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, 2003 P. Nicopolitidis , A. S. Pomportsis , G. I. Papadimitriou and M. S. Obaidat, Wireless Networks, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 2003 OPNET Technologies, "OPNET Modeler Brochure" and "OPNET Radio Module", OPNET Technologies, Bethesda, 2002. Smart grid policy U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), Docket PL09-4-000, 2009. IEEE Std 802.15.4TM 2006, IEEE Standard for Wireless Medium Aceess Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs), 2006 ZigBee Alliance, ZigBee Specification 053474r18, June 2009. http://www.zigbee.org ZigBee Alliance, ZigBee Home Automation Public Application Profile 053520r26, August 2009. http://www.zigbee.org ZigBee Alliance. ZigBee Cluster Library Specification 075123r06, May 2008. http://www.zigbee.org

Figure 7. Total packets and effective sending packets by six sources under variable traffic

Fig. 5 shows the packet reception rate with variable sources. From the trend of curve, it is found that the number of traffic sources must be limited to four or less to ensure that no packet loss when average traffic of the network is 10packets/s/source. If the number of traffic sources reaches 5 and 6, more traffic will be put into the network which may raise the congestion and decrease the possibility of reception. So the packet reception rate drops to 99.9% and 99.6% correspondingly. Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 show the packets by different number of sources under variable traffic. The black curve describes the total packets which are increased in proportion of the growing average traffic. And the red one describes the effective sending packets. While the operating interval is smaller, some packets will be dropped due to the APS flow control and user operation will not be responded successfully. On the other hand, faster the frequency of user operation grows, more packets will be

[2]

[3]

[4] [5] [6]

[7] [8] [9]

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