Communication costs versus smart grid system performance for energy prosumers' participation in liberalized electricity markets: A trade-off analysis

In the smart grid era, various actors and S/W agents need to exchange vast amounts of data towards meeting the communication requirements of the emerging smart energy network infrastructures and the efficient operation of the smart grid system. In this paper, we consider a hierarchical smart grid architecture, in which a novel aggregator market entity is introduced, which acts as an intermediary between the various market/grid operators and the small-scale energy prosumers. A trade-off analysis is undertaken to study the problem of minimizing the utilized network bandwidth without compromising the efficient smart grid system performance.