Taskin Kocak

Smart Grid Technologies: Communication Technologies and Standards

For 100 years, there has been no change in the basic structure of the electrical power grid. Experiences have shown that the hierarchical, centrally controlled grid of the 20th Century is ill-suited to the needs of the 21st Century. To address the challenges of the existing power grid, the new concept of smart grid has emerged. The smart grid can be considered as a modern electric power grid infrastructure for enhanced efficiency and reliability through automated control, high-power converters, modern communications infrastructure, sensing and metering technologies, and modern energy management techniques based on the optimization of demand, energy and network availability, and so on. While current power systems are based on a solid information and communication infrastructure, the new smart grid needs a different and much more complex one, as its dimension is much larger. This paper addresses critical issues on smart grid technologies primarily in terms of information and communication technology (ICT) issues and opportunities. The main objective of this paper is to provide a contemporary look at the current state of the art in smart grid communications as well as to discuss the still-open research issues in this field. It is expected that this paper will provide a better understanding of the technologies, potential advantages and research challenges of the smart grid and provoke interest among the research community to further explore this promising research area.

A Survey on Smart Grid Potential Applications and Communication Requirements

Information and communication technologies (ICT) represent a fundamental element in the growth and performance of smart grids. A sophisticated, reliable and fast communication infrastructure is, in fact, necessary for the connection among the huge amount of distributed elements, such as generators, substations, energy storage systems and users, enabling a real time exchange of data and information necessary for the management of the system and for ensuring improvements in terms of efficiency, reliability, flexibility and investment return for all those involved in a smart grid: producers, operators and customers. This paper overviews the issues related to the smart grid architecture from the perspective of potential applications and the communications requirements needed for ensuring performance, flexible operation, reliability and economics.

Smart Grid and Smart Homes: Key Players and Pilot Projects

The smart grid (SG) is envisioned as providing a communications network for the energy industry, similar to that which the Internet now provides for business and personal communications. The SG offers new business opportunities for different kind of industries, such as smart-meter vendors, electric utilities, and telecom operators from all around the world. This article deals with issues related to smart homes (SHs) and smart metering, which are key elements in the new SG. It introduces the key players in this field and points out the research challenges. Finally, SG pilot projects and field tests from all around the world and the deployment of advance metering infrastructure projects in North America, Asia, and Europe are summarized.

A low power lookup technique for multi-hashing network applications

Many network security applications require large virus signature sets to be maintained, retrieved, and compared against the network streams. Software applications frequently fail to identify so many signatures through comparisons at very high network speeds. Bloom filters are one of the main multi-hashing schemes utilized in hardware to support this level of security. Nevertheless Bloom filters consume significant power to store, retrieve and lookup virus signatures owing to many hash function computations required to index to the memory. We present a novel lookup technique and architecture to decrease the power consumption of multi-hashing schemes, predominantly Bloom filters, in hardware. The theoretical analysis has shown that power gain achieved through new lookup technique can go up to 90%. Simulation results with three different classes of the hash functions embedded into the Bloom filter have indicated that power consumption of the Bloom filters can be considerably decreased by employing the low power lookup technique

Matrix Codes for Reliable and Cost Efficient Memory Chips

This paper presents a method to protect memories against multiple bit upsets and to improve manufacturing yield. The proposed method, called a Matrix code, combines Hamming and Parity codes to assure the improvement of reliability and yield of the memory chips in the presence of high defects and multiple bit-upsets. The method is evaluated using fault injection experiments. The results are compared to well-known techniques such as Reed-Muller and Hamming codes. The proposed technique performs better than the Hamming codes and achieves comparable performance with Reed-Muller codes with very favorable implementation gains such as 25% reduction in area and power consumption. It also achieves reliability increase by more than 50% in some cases. Further, the yield benefits provided by the proposed method, measured by the yield improvements per cost metric, is up to 300% better than the ones provided by Reed-Muller codes.

Survey of random neural network applications

Abstract This paper consists of a survey of various engineering applications based on the random neural network (RNN) model [Neural Computation 1(4) (1989) 502–511; 2(2) (1990) 239–247; Comptes-Rendus Acad. Sci. t. Serie II 310(2) (1990) 177–180; Applied Math. Modelling 15 (1991) 534–541; Neural Computation 5(1) (1993) 154–164], and also a summary of the recent image processing techniques such as still image compression, image enlargement, and image fusion. The advantage of the RNN model is that it is closer to biophysical reality and mathematically more tractable than standard neural methods, especially when used as a recurrent structure.

Low-power bloom filter architecture for deep packet inspection

Bloom filters are frequently used to identify malicious content like viruses in high speed networks. However, architectures proposed to implement bloom filters are not power efficient. In this letter, we propose a new bloom filter architecture that exploits the well-known pipelining technique. Through power analysis we show that pipelining can reduce the power consumption of bloom filters up to 90%, which leads to the energy-efficient implementation of intrusion detection systems.

Learning in the feed-forward random neural network: A critical review

The Random Neural Network (RNN) has received, since its inception in 1989, considerable attention and has been successfully used in a number of applications. In this critical review paper we focus on the feed-forward RNN model and its ability to solve classification problems. In particular, we paid special attention to the RNN literature related with learning algorithms that discover the RNN interconnection weights, suggested other potential algorithms that can be used to find the RNN interconnection weights, and compared the RNN model with other neural-network based and non-neural network based classifier models. In review, the extensive literature review and experimentation with the RNN feed-forward model provided us with the necessary guidance to introduce six critical review comments that identify some gaps in the RNNs related literature and suggest directions for future research.

Throughput and Coverage Performance for IEEE 802.11ad Millimeter-Wave WPANs

Recently, the development and requirement for ultra-high data rate wireless communication applications has increased dramatically. The 60 GHz millimeter-wave wireless technology is getting increasing attention, and the IEEE 802.11 Task Group AD is making standardization efforts for multi-gigabit data rate communications on both the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers. This paper presents a performance evaluation of the PHY and MAC layers of IEEE 802.11ad. Packet error rate and PHY throughput are presented for different modes, and the theoretical MAC throughput is analyzed for different bit error rates, packet sizes and modes. In addition, 2×2 space-time block coding (STBC) is employed for range extension. The cross layer results show our approach enhance the throughput and coverage compared to the case of single antenna.

A Technique to Identify and Substitute Faulty Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a technique to identify and substitute faulty nodes to achieve fault tolerance in wireless sensor networks. The proposed technique divides the network into disjoint zones while having a master for each zone. The zone masters are used to identify faulty nodes by virtually dividing the zone into quadrants until a suspect node is found. Our fault model assumes both communication and sensing faults which are caused by a hardware failure in anode. To detect communication faults, the division process is based on calculating the throughput for each zone and comparing it to a predefined threshold. However, for sensing faults it is based on comparing the data a node senses to a predefined status and data ranges. In addition, we make use of a new technique, which was inspired by the Roll Forward Checkpointing Scheme, to activate sleeping nodes in order to validate the correctness of the suspected nodes. This is used to reconfigure the network using fault free nodes only.