Advance in Smart Grid by Embedding a Last Meter in Internet of Things

Abstract

The customer domain of the smart grid naturally
blends with smart home and smart building systems,
but typical proposed approaches are “distributor-centric” rather
than “customer-centric,” undermining user acceptance, and are
often poorly scalable. To solve this problem, we propose a
detailed architecture and an implementation of a “last-meter”
smart grid—the portion of the smart grid on customer
premises—embedded in an internet-of-things (IoT) platform. Our
approach has four aspects of novelty and advantages with respect
to the state of the art: 1) seamless integration of smart grid
with smart home applications in the same infrastructure; 2) data
gathering from heterogeneous sensor communication protocols;
3) secure and customized data access; and 4) univocal sensor
and actuator mapping to a common abstraction layer on which
additional concurrent applications can be built. A demonstrator
has been built and tested with purposely-developed ZigBee smart
meters and gateways, a distributed IoT server, and a flexible user
interface.