PLC-Based Smart grid Home Network System Design and Implementation using OPNET Simulation

The Smart grid refers to the technology that enables efficient usage of electric power by collecting information concerning the power usage and power lines grafting information and communications technology to onto power grids. There are Zigbee, PLC or IEEE 802.11 WLAN MAC as a core technology of the Smart grid, but in this paper, the discussion is focused on the PLC. The PLC is the technology that carries out data communications using power lines and put into practical use in the field of lights or home appliances control recently but PLC-applied communications between electronic devices are rarely seen. For the reason that the PLC uses high-voltage power lines and has a disadvantage of experiencing higher data loss rate caused by the noises produced by going through transformers, the technology is yet to be used in many areas. Nevertheless, the PLC has been studied widely recently in respect that it's the low-cost communication solution for the Smart Metering [1]. Moreover, this technology is emerging as a novel data communication method and discussed as an important technology lately due to the developments of the Smart grid systems and Internet of things (IoT). Thus, in this paper, the results obtained from designing and performing implementation scenario for the PLC-based Smart grid home network system were compared and analyzed with that of IEEE 802.11 WLAN MAC (the foundation technology at Jeju Smart grid Test bed)-based Smart grid home network. Thus, in this paper, OPNET 14.5 PL8, OSI 7 layer, PLC router nodes and PLC nodes had been used for the designing and implementation simulations of both systems. Additionally, QoS was not considered in order to guarantee that all the traffics would not have the same processing priority.