Paul L. Russell

Enabling Smart Grid with ETSI M2M standards

There are global initiatives underway to establish a communications framework for Smart Grid systems. These efforts are led by governments, standardization bodies, and industry consortiums. This paper analyzes several challenges that are associated with communicating in Smart Grid systems and assesses the suitability of using the European Telecommunications Standards Institutes machine to machine architectures and protocols (ETSI M2M) to communicate in Smart Grid systems. The paper concludes with a presentation of an ETSI M2M compliant prototyping system that demonstrates solutions to some of the communications challenges that are found in Smart Grid systems.

CA-P2P: context-aware proximity-based peer-to-peer wireless communications

Many new wireless applications such as public safety and social networking have been emerging in recent years. Those applications introduce the necessity of direct communications among devices or peers without core network or wireless routers, which is not well supported in current network infrastructures. While some existing technologies can support certain levels of direct peer-to-peer communications, they are context-oblivious and inefficient. This article proposes a context-aware proximity-based P2P (CA-P2P) wireless communication system architecture to enable context awareness for direct P2P communications. The main idea is to systematically incorporate appropriate context information in direct communication protocols to improve overall performance. One of the major features is application-based communication, which connects peers according to their common applications. Accordingly, radio resources can be managed more efficiently among and within different application groups. Specifically, the scheme proposed in this article includes several new mechanisms such as context-aware peer discovery and context-aware peer association. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed context awareness system achieves fast and efficient peer discovery and peer association in terms of latency and overhead.

ETSI M2M release 1 demonstration

Due to the growing market and research interests on communication protocols for applications that require little or no human intervention, called Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications, the European Telecommunications Standardization Institute (ETSI) founded in 2009 a Technical Committee on the topic, which has released its first complete set of technical recommendations in October 2011 as ETSI M2M Release 1. The standard is agnostic with respect to both the application domains in which it can be used, ranging from, e.g., smart grid to personal health systems, and the underlying data transport and access technologies. We demonstrate the feasibility of an ETSI-compliant complete end-to-end system, which uses the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) protocol under definition at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), showing its potential to meet the expectations of M2M applications of practical interest.