Power-line communications for smart grid: Progress, challenges, opportunities and status

Power-line communications (PLC) have proven to be susceptible to the next-generation power transmission/distribution systems with end-to-end communication capability, considered as a revolutionary and evolutionary regime of existing power grids. More importantly, with recent advancements in PLC technological regulation, standardization and certification have spurred a lot of interest in the field of advanced communication and control technologies for heterogeneous networks. These advancements are expected to greatly enhance efficiency and reliability of future power systems with renewable energy resources, as well as distributed intelligence and demand response (DR) programs. As various national and international organizations have started to draw PLC regulations, standards and technologies for countries, these standards intend to determine important criteria such as bandwidth, modulation types, channel coding schemes, operating frequency and electromagnetic capability limits from fixed indoor/outdoor applications to smart grid (SG) applications. Depending on the worldwide PLC regulation, standardization and technological developments, security schemes built around them can become interoperable from a standard point of view, but still have incompatible configurations or different maturity levels, or include non-standardized PLC functions. Moreover, the PLC based systems/solutions for renewable energy integration, are also surveyed in terms of distributed-power 'system (DPS) and distributed energy resources (DERs) units monitoring/controlling and management purposes. Thus, a particular section is dedicated to PLC based systems/solutions utilization of renewable energy sources (RESs) in SG covering all aspects of a monotype and hybrid energy plants. Finally, the survey is carried on by reviewing the most recent and comprehensive articles to highlight the importance of PLC in a logical way in the smart grid for readers. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.