Wi-Fi 6-based home area network for demand response in smart grid

The past decade has brought prolific developments to power systems that range from large-scale renewable integration to digital twins. Modern power systems consist of highly variable generation clusters. Hence, monitoring and prediction of power generation has become a vital part of today's power systems. On the other hand, detailed real-time information of power usage is also a key parameter for the control algorithms used for the demand side management. With this information flow, power systems become smart grids which offer improved service and enable many advanced operations. In this regard, the home area network (HAN), which collects the power consumption/generation of household devices, plays a key role. So far, a number of technologies such as ZigBee, Z-Wave, and Power Line Communication (PLC) have been considered for the HAN. Yet, widely used wireless local area network (WLAN) technology, Wi-Fi, was not identified as a prominent candidate due to the limitations in its latency and reliability. However, with the introduction of the IEEE 802.11ax standard, Wi-Fi 6 was developed, and it demonstrates guaranteed latency and reliability for its users. Thus, with its widespread deployment in households, Wi-Fi is becoming a natural candidate for HAN. In this article, we present a comprehensive HAN protocol based on Wi-Fi 6 which can achieve guaranteed latency and reliability for HAN users. The results show that when an efficient resource allocation mechanism is in place, using Wi-Fi for HAN does not adversely affect the other Wi-Fi users in the normal WLAN. We have investigated the possibility of using the new Wi-Fi 6 standard for home area networks (HAN) of smart grids. The legacy Wi-Fi 5 networks are not performing well in HANs owing to the CSMA/CA-based MAC protocol. The results obtained through the simulations studies show that the OFDMA-based MAC protocols makes Wi-Fi 6 a prominent candidate for the HANs. Using a suitable scheduling algorithm, the smart energy monitoring devices can meet the delay requirements of the demand management algorithms. image