Demand-Response Management Using a Fleet of Electric Vehicles: An Opportunistic-SDN-Based Edge-Cloud Framework for Smart Grids

Abstract

Rapid advancements in IIoT have paved the way to the evolution of SGs, which support many applications including DRM, energy sharing, and fault recovery. Among these, DRM is very critical since it helps to maintain adequate balance between electricity demand and supply. However, with the increasing penetration of EVs and their dynamic charging and discharging requirements, energy management in SGs is expected to face some serious challenges. Thus, to exploit the full potential of EVs in terms of DRM, cloud computing and edge computing have emerged as powerful computational models. The latter mimics the capabilities of the powerful cloud computing infrastructure but closer to the users. Hence, in this article, we present an edge-cloud framework where cooperation among cloud and edge devices is realized to make intelligent decisions related to EVs charging and discharging in addition to achieving the expected demand-supply balance. However, one of the fundamental challenges of this setup is induced due to a large number of migrations in the edge-cloud setup, primarily due to network congestion and EVs mobility patterns. Hence, to handle this problem, an amalgamation of software-defined networking (SDN) with opportunistic networks (OppNetworks) can be a viable solution, referred to as opportunistic SDN (Opp-SDN). Specifically, the proposed work exploits the use of EVs in two forms: as energy reservoirs for instantaneous DRM and as forwarding nodes in Opp-SDN. To realize EVs activities in both forms, this work formulates dedicated Stackelberg game-based approaches for DRM and Opp-SDN. The obtained results indicate superior performance of the proposed scheme in contrast to the existing state-of-the-art schemes.