Distributed Online Algorithm for Optimal Real-Time Energy Distribution in the Smart Grid

In recent years, the smart grid has been recognized as an important form of the Internet of Things (IoT). The two-way energy and information flows in a smart gird, together with the smart devices, bring about new perspectives to energy management. This paper investigates a distributed online algorithm for electricity distribution in a smart grid environment. We first present a formulation that captures the key design factors such as user's utility, grid load smoothing, and energy provisioning cost. The problem is shown to be convex and can be solved with a centralized online algorithm that only requires present information about users and the grid in our prior work. In this paper, we develop a distributed online algorithm that decomposes and solves the online problem in a distributed manner, and prove that the distributed online solution is asymptotically optimal. The proposed distributed online algorithm is also practical and mitigates the user privacy issue by not sharing user utility functions. It is evaluated with trace-driven simulations and shown to outperform a benchmark scheme.