Smart Grid Communication Using Open Smart Grid Protocol

The smart grid transfers electricity from power utilities to the customers’ end using full-duplex digital communication technology and helps us to control the home appliances and factory machines to save electricity while reducing costs and increasing reliability and transparency. So, in order to ensure the grid reliability, we need to monitor and control the smart me-ters by means of data transfer and command signals on the single power line without using any other communication media to improve the cost-effectiveness of the proposed study. This paper proposes a hardware implementation of a Power Line Communication (PLC) protocol named Open Smart Grid Protocol (OSGP). This protocol is based on the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model. The proposed system comprises monitoring and controlling server (Lap-top/Desktop), power line communication modem, two PIC18f4520 microcontrollers, one energy meter and power line as transmission media. This protocol is first implemented on a server in C-sharp by using the OSI model approach, and then on micro-controllers in order to control the energy meter. The power line communication modem is used to send and receive the data between the server and the energy meter. Finally, results are presented to validate the hardware implementation of the protocol.