Lines of communication: Architecture and solutions for linking the elements of the smart distribution grid

Modern power systems include elements ranging all the way from central station generation and transmission down to customer-owned distribution generation, with advanced monitoring and automation systems at every level. Significantly, every part of this power system either contains information required by other entities or needs to interact from a control perspective with other parts of the system. The emerging power system communication requirements are not just traditional home-run SCADA requirements; they are more like a mesh in which any point in the system may need to communicate with any other point in the system. The speed and latency requirements for this communication range all the way from milliseconds to hours. © 2011 IEEE.