Infrastructure and applications of Internet of Things in smart grids: A survey

The Internet of things (IoT) is a rapidly evolving technology capable of transforming numerous areas of our lives. Smart Grid (SG) is one of such areas, which has an immense potential of development, following the advances in IoT technology. The goal of the current survey is to summarize the infrastructure and applications of IoT in SGs. The infrastructure aspect is described from the viewpoints of physical and software implementation. A general configuration of IoT processing layers with a respect to SGs' infrastructure is introduced in this description. Applications of IoT in SGs are described for several structural and functional parts of SGs: Customer Interactions, Generation, Transmission, Distribution, Smart Metering, Grid Maintenance and Management. A summary of application advantages, such as real-time bidirectional data communication and advanced sensing, and implementation challenges, such as interoperability of various technological standards and rigorous privacy and security requirements, of IoT in SGs are presented in this survey.