| During the last century, the significant increase in electricity demand, and its consequences, has appeared as a serious concern for the utility companies, but no essential change has been applied to the conventional power grid infrastructure till now. Recently, researchers have identified efficient control and power distribution mechanisms as the immediate challenges for conventional power grids. Hence, the next step for conventional power grid toward Smart Grid is to provide energy efficiency management along with higher reliability via smart services, in which the application of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is inevitable. ICT introduces powerful tools to comply with the smart grid requirements. Among various ICT properties, the telecommunication network plays a key role for providing a secure infrastructure. The two-way digital communication system provides an interaction between energy suppliers and consumers for managing, controlling and optimizing energy distribution. We can also define the smart grid as a two-way flow of energy and control information, where the electricity consumers can generate energy using green energy resources. The main objective of this thesis is to select an effective communication infrastructure to support the smart grid services by considering wireless and optical communication technologies. Fiber-wireless (FiWi) networks are considered as a potential solution to provide a fast and reliable network backbone with the optical access network integration and the flexibility and mobility of the wireless network. Therefore, we adopt the integration of the wireless sensor network (WSN) to Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) as a broadband access network to transmit smart meter data along with the Fiber To The Home/Building/Curb (FTTX) traffic through the shared fiber. Finally, we present and analyze the simulation results for the aforementioned infrastructure based on our adopted priority-based FTTX-WSN integration model. |
