Joint Consideration of Communication Network and Power Grid Topology for Communications in Community Smart Grid

Community smart grid is formed by a group of neighboring households to share renewable generators and energy storage facilities. Within a community grid, all power grid entities are connected to power lines that are downstream to a common substation. In this paper, we use device-to-device communications to connect sensors that are installed at grid entities to their respective control units. The topology and node membership of such communication network depend on the topology of its power grid. As such, a communication node may not be assigned the best quality channel. This has imposed additional constraints in radio resource allocation. We exploit the feature that sensors and control units are static but cellular users are mobile, in proposing a two-stage radio resource allocation scheme. In the planning stage, we use the Hungarian method to find the optimal channel assignment for static sensors and control units. In the operation stage, we run recursively the Hungarian algorithm to allocate proportionally all remaining channels to cellular users. Given the channel assignment, the operation stage further performs transmit power allocation to all nodes. The power control problem is originally nonconvex. We transform the problem into a difference of convex structure, which can be solved successively. We have evaluated the proposed radio resource allocation scheme through extensive simulations. Results confirm that the scheme is indeed efficient in assigning channels and finding the minimum transmit power, to maximize sum-rate of cellular users while guaranteeing a minimum throughput to each sensor and control unit.