IoT architecture and routing for MV and LV smart grid

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are cost effective for numerous applications including smart cities, environmental monitoring, industry process control, etc. Hence, WSNs form the major hardware infrastructure for the Internet of Things (IoT). Nowadays, homes and cities become smarter by installing sensors and actuators to manage energy consumption through WSNs and IoT integration. According to the demand, loads are shut off or can be shifted to off-peak times. The 2030 and 2050 visions of Electrical power system are not only to deliver energy from suppliers to consumers but also to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) into the electrical power system to reduce the cost, optimize the energy and increase the reliability. Though Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is used to monitor high power transmission, low and medium voltages are less monitored and controlled. This paper proposes an architecture for IoT smart grid (SG) to monitor and control low and medium voltage networks. Since WSNs is being incorporated, careful designing of energy efficient routing protocol is critical due to limited power of sensor nodes (SNs) and the spread of information in WSNs. This motivates our research to propose an IPv6 compatible hierarchical routing protocol based on clustering for IoT SG. The simulation results of the proposed IPv6 routing protocol achieves extended network lifetime for WSNs and shorter delay compared to standardized RPL.