Last-Meter Smart Grid Embedded in an Internet-of-Things Platform

The customer domain of the smart grid naturally blends with smart home and smart building systems, but typical proposed approaches are “distributor-centric” rather than “customer-centric,” undermining user acceptance, and are often poorly scalable. To solve this problem, we propose a detailed architecture and an implementation of a “last-meter” smart grid—the portion of the smart grid on customer premises—embedded in an internet-of-things (IoT) platform. Our approach has four aspects of novelty and advantages with respect to the state of the art: 1) seamless integration of smart grid with smart home applications in the same infrastructure; 2) data gathering from heterogeneous sensor communication protocols; 3) secure and customized data access; and 4) univocal sensor and actuator mapping to a common abstraction layer on which additional concurrent applications can be built. A demonstrator has been built and tested with purposely-developed ZigBee smart meters and gateways, a distributed IoT server, and a flexible user interface.