Tarek Khalifa

A Survey of Communication Protocols for Automatic Meter Reading Applications

Utility companies (electricity, gas, and water suppliers), governments, and researchers have been urging to deploy communication-based systems to read meters, known as automatic meter reading (AMR). An AMR system is envisaged to bring on benefits to customers, utilities, and governments. The advantages include reducing peak demand for energy, supporting the time-of-use concept for billing, enabling customers to make informed decisions, and reducing the cost of meter reading, to name a few. A key element in an AMR system is communications between meters and utility servers. Though several communication technologies have been proposed and implemented at a small scale, with the wide proliferation of wireless communication, it is the right time to critique the old proposals and explore new possibilities for the next generation AMR. We provide a comprehensive review of the AMR technologies proposed so far. Next, we present how future AMRs will benefit from third generation (3G) communication systems, the DLMS/COSEM (Data Language Messaging Specification/Companion Specification for Energy Metering) standard and Internet Protocol-based SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) signaling at the application level. The DLMS/COSEM standard provides a framework for meters to report application data (i.e. meter readings) to a utility server in a reliable manner. The SIP protocol is envisaged to be used as the signaling protocol between application entities running on meters and servers. The DLMS/COSEM standard and the SIP protocol are expected to provide an application level communication abstraction to achieve reliability and scalability. Finally, we identify the challenges at the application level that need to be tackled. The challenges include handling failure, gathering meter data under different time constraints (ranging from real-time to delay-tolerance), disseminating (i.e., unicasting, multicasting, broadcasting, and geocasting) control data to the meters, and achieving secure communication.

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication is a promising technology for next generation communication systems. This communication paradigm facilitates ubiquitous communications with full mechanical automation, where a large number of intelligent devices connected by wired/wireless links, interact with each other without direct human intervention. As a result, M2M communication finds applications in wide areas such as smart grids, e-healthcare, home area networks, intelligent transportation systems, environmental monitoring, smart cities, and industrial automation. However, distinctive features in M2M communications form different challenges from those in human-to-human communications. These challenges need to be addressed, or otherwise it is not easy for this paradigm to gain trust of people. To understand M2M communications deeply, this paper presents a comprehensive review of M2M communication technology in terms of its system model architecture proposed by different standards developing organizations. This mainly includes 3GPP, ETSI, and oneM2M. Further, we have investigated distinctive features of various M2M applications and their supporting attributes, the M2M data traffic and their characterization, various M2M standardization bodies and their unique tasks, and potential M2M communication challenges and their proposed state-of-the-art solutions, followed by future research directions.

Optimization of Fuel Cost and Emissions Using V2V Communications

Vehicular communication networks are increasingly being considered as a means to conserve fuel and reduce emissions within transportation systems. This paper focuses on using traffic light signals to communicate with approaching vehicles. The communication can be traffic-light-signal-to-vehicle (TLS2V) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V). Based on the information sent, the vehicle receiving the message adapts its speed to a recommended speed (SR), which helps the vehicle reduce fuel consumption and emissions. The key contribution of this paper is the proposal of a comprehensive optimization model that involves V2V and TLS2V communications. The objective function is to minimize fuel consumption by and emissions from vehicles. The speed that can achieve this goal is the optimum SR (SR*). We also propose efficient heuristic expressions to compute the optimum or near-optimum value of SR.

Transport protocol for smart grid infrastructure

There is an emerging class of applications in which there is a need to reliably transport data from a large number of low rate devices (e.g., hundreds of thousands) to a central server. Atop the list of such applications is smart grid infrastructure. Other applications include meteorological applications, such as monitoring of weather, pollution, and allergy conditions. These applications are characterized by the existence of a large number of small Internet Protocol (IP) devices sending small packets at a low rate to the same server. Even though individual data rates are low, aggregation of these rates produce a significant amount of traffic that can disrupt the communication function of other applications. Because individual devices produce data at a low rate, the transmission control protocols (TCP) congestion control mechanism is rendered ineffective, thereby causing (i) excessive retransmission of packets; and (ii) degrading the throughput of other competing applications. To address the above problems, we introduce the concept of aggregation at the communication transport level. A TCP aggregator node is added between the data sources and the central server. It splits the TCP connections between the sources (e.g., smart meters) and the data collection server. The aggregator collects data from the individual sources and reliably forwards the data to the collection server. The new strategy provides better response to traffic conditions and, most importantly, makes congestion control and flow control useful. Through extensive NS-2 simulations, we show the effectiveness of the TCP aggregator approach to mitigating the problems in terms of the throughput and packet drop rate performance metrics.

Vehicular networks for reduction of fuel consumption and CO 2 emission

With recent advances in the development of wireless communication networks, vehicular networks have been receiving considerable research interest. One of the major applications of vehicular networks is Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). To exchange and distribute messages, geocast routing protocols have been proposed for ITS applications. Almost all of these protocols evaluate network-centric performance measures, instead of evaluating the impact of the protocol on the vehicular system. Nowadays, rising fuel costs and the harmful effects of air pollutants have been the subject of considerable public debate. Therefore, it is desirable to create new economical and environmentally friendly geocast (EEFG) protocols, which focus on minimizing vehicle fuel consumption and emissions. The main goals of this paper are to motivate communications researchers to design EEFG protocols, demonstrate the ability to integrate fuel and emission models with vehicular networks, and illustrate the benefit of transmitting the traffic light signal information to vehicles for fuel consumption and emission reduction. By means of an example, we show how vehicular networks can be used to reduce fuel consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission in a city environment. Simulation results demonstrate that vehicle fuel consumption and CO2 emission will be reduced if such an EEFG protocol is used.

Split- and Aggregated-Transmission Control Protocol (SA-TCP) for Smart Power Grid

This paper introduces our proposed Split- and Aggregated-TCP (SA-TCP) schemes enhanced TCP performance in a smart metering infrastructure (SMI). The scheme is based on upgrading intermediate devices (e.g., regional collectors) to aggregate TCP connections. An SA-TCP aggregator collects data packets from smart meters in a certain region over separate TCP connections, then reliably aggregates them in one TCP connection to the management server of the utility. Our proposed scheme responds better to data traffic dynamics of smart meters and makes TCP congestion control effective. A full mathematical model of SA-TCP is provided. Validated by extensive ns-2 simulations, the model accurately and flexibly predicts the SA-TCP schemes throughput, packet loss rate and packet delay. Furthermore, we formulate an optimization problem to find the optimal number of SA-TCP aggregators that ensures acceptable packet loss rate and delay.

Optimization of fuel cost and emissions with vehicular networks at traffic intersections

The volatile world economy has greatly affected fuel prices, while pollution and gas emissions are increasing to negatively impact global warming. Vehicular networks offer a promising approach that can be applied in transportation systems to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. One of the interesting applications involves a traffic light signal sending information to approaching vehicles. Based on that information, the vehicle receiving the message adapts its speed to a speed called the recommended speed (SR), which is the speed that helps the vehicle to reduce fuel consumption and emissions. In this paper, we propose an optimization model with the objective of minimizing fuel consumption and emissions. The speed that can achieve this goal is the optimum SR. We also propose an efficient heuristic expression to compute near-optimal values of the optimum SR.

Fault Detection, Isolation, and Service Restoration in Distribution Systems: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends

This paper surveys the conceptual aspects, as well as recent developments in fault detection, isolation, and service restoration (FDIR) following an outage in an electric distribution system. This paper starts with a discussion of the rationale for FDIR, and then investigates different areas of the FDIR problem. Recently reported approaches are compared and related to discussions on current practices. This paper then addresses some of the often-cited associated technical, environmental, and economic challenges of implementing self-healing for the distribution grid. The review concludes by pointing toward the need and directions for future research.

Multicast Tree Repair and Maintenance in the Cloud

Network virtualization enables the multi-tenancy concept where multiple tenantss services can cohabit the same substrate network and share its resources. With multi-tenancy, the problem of allocating resources to the various tenants emerges as a challenging problem. This former is commonly known as the virtual network embedding problem (VNE), which has attracted numerous effort from the research industry due to its NP-Hard nature. Yet, most of the existing work overlook the various modes of communication a virtual network (VN) can exhibit, assuming it is always a one-to-one communication between virtual machines (VMs). The recent technological advancements (such as Software Defined Networks (SDNs)) have paved the way for efficient multicast in data center networks, thereby leveraging the support of services and applications which multicast data in large volumes. While much work has been devoted for studying the problem of multicast virtual network (MVN) embedding in the cloud, little attention has been paid to investigating the impact of failure on this service class. In this paper, we study the impact of facility node failure on embedded MVNs, and introduce a novel post-failure restoration scheme to repair failed MVNs while maintaining their requested Quality of Service (QoS). Our numerical results prove that our suggested method achieves encouraging restoration ratio in considerably fast execution time.

Geocast Routing in Vehicular Networks for Reduction of CO2 Emissions

Pollution and gas emissions are increasing and negatively impacting global warming. Consequently, researchers are looking for solutions that save environment. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from vehicles are considered to be one of the main contributing sources. Carbon dioxide (CO 2) is the largest component of GHG emissions. Vehicular networks offer promising technology that can be applied for reduction of CO 2 emissions. One of the major applications of vehicular networks is Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). To exchange and distribute messages, geocast routing protocols have been proposed for ITS applications. Almost all of these protocols evaluate network-centric performance measures, instead of evaluating the impact of the protocol on the vehicular system. Nowadays, the harmful effects of air pollutants have been the subject of considerable public debate. Vehicles’ stop-and-go condition, high speed, and high accelerations are environmentally unfriendly actions (EUF) that increase the amount of emissions. These actions can happen frequently for vehicles approaching a traffic light signal (TLS). Therefore, we propose a new protocol named environmentally friendly geocast (EFG), which focuses on minimizing CO 2 emissions from vehicles approaching a TLS by avoiding the EUF actions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol can achieve effective reduction of vehicle CO 2 emissions.