Applying Overlay Networks To The Smart Grid And Energy Collectives

With the desire from prosumers and energy collectives to trade energy directly with peers, engage in dynamic changing contract relationships and decentralized energy markets, technologies such as overlay networks can be used to provide the communication layer to facilitate routing, dynamic discovery and communication between the peers. In this paper, we will show that using the properties in the smart grid, such as the physical location of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) and the clustered topology of energy collectives, the efficiency of the routing in standard overlay networks can be improved by introducing a location-aware heuristic and concepts from complex network theory. The improved routing model is tested and verified by comparing a proof of concept with different network models and properties from the smart grid and energy collectives, against a standard overlay network implementation. The results show that in the context of the smart grid, routing efficiency in a decentralized communication layer can be significantly improved and the issues found in previous work can be alleviated by using concepts from complex networks.