GRID-CITY: A Framework to Share Smart Grids Communication with Smart City Applications

Smart grids (SG) have been successfully deployed in several countries. In Brazil, the main agency for the wide(r) SG deployment are the electricity companies that operate under federal or state government concession. This paper presents a framework for sharing the SG communication infrastructure with smart city applications. This sharing would accelerate the development and implementation of new applications, especially in less developed countries or in regions with scarce communication resources. We present preliminary performance results for an existing SG. Our results indicate that, with only the energy metering application, the network operates with a duty cycle of less than 2%. Our work will assess the impact on overall performance of smart city applications sharing the SG.