Consumer-oriented integration of smart homes and smart grids: A case for multicast-enabled Home Gateways?

Smart Home automation is pushing into the consumer market for several years, while at the same time energy companies are working on the deployment of Smart Grids. Although, a key idea of the energy transition is to integrate small energy devices at the consumers site, the potential benefits of Smart Home technologies for Smart Grids remain unused at large until now. In this work we present a concept for consumer-oriented integration of Smart Home devices into Smart Grid applications using multicast-enabled Home Gateways. An evaluation using standard consumer hardware confirms general feasibility and performance of our approach. Further, we deployed a measurement testbed in the metropolitan area of Hamburg to analyze typical end-to-end Internet connectivity of consumer households.