Availability Improvements through Data Slicing in PLC Smart Grid Networks.

An electrical power grid, is an interconnected network for delivering electricity from producers to consumers. Electrical grids vary in size from covering a single building through national grids (which cover whole countries) to transnational grids (which can cross continents). As the rollout of smart meters continues worldwide, there are use-cases where common solutions fail and the network availability of certain meters is very low due to poor communication conditions. This paper proposes a data slicing model for large data files which have to travel securely and reliably throughout the Smart Grid. The manuscript addresses improvements for PRIME PLC network availability by using correct data slicing at the application level along a tuned transmission rate in accordance with the noise levels of the power grid. Successful communications, even at low rates, mean that no manual interaction from energy supplier operators is needed reducing the maintenance costs for both the energy companies as well as for the end user. Experiments on a low power electrical grid setup have been performed in order to evaluate availability improvements through the proposed method as well as the feasibility of remote firmware upgrades. The results have shown that the current approach has similar upgrade time results with a manual firmware upgrade performed through an optical probe. Moreover, the results show that the presented remote firmware upgrade method is reliable and practical.