Convergence of Wireless Sensor Network with Smart Grid Environment Based on IPv6 Protocol

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is defined as a scattered topology of sensor nodes, sensing the data from the environment, processing and transmitting it to server node. This architecture is comparable to a smart grid application 'Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI)' where a smart meter (node) serves as a data collecting device and reports the energy usage to the server. Although the IEEE802.15.4/ZigBee standard is widely considered as the communication protocol in WSN, it scales unsatisfactorily while interacting with the Internet. Hence, this paper establishes an analogy between the Smart Grid infrastructure and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), and proposes a highly robust and efficient networking protocol known as Internet Protocol version6 (IPv6). The major issue addressed here is organizing and maintaining a wide spanning network such as in AMI, by emphasizing on the network management protocols governed by IPv6.