Device-to-Device Communications for Energy Management: A Smart Grid Case

The transmission of simultaneous and latency-sensitive data puts forth a significant challenge for the smart grid communications. In this paper, we investigate the application of device-to-device (D2D) communications for the energy management in the electric distribution network. Specifically, we develop a D2D-assisted relaying framework to exploit the spatial diversity and the differentiated data rate requirements, which improves the spectral efficiency, especially for the scenarios that there are faults in the electric distribution network. We study the data transmission scheduling problem under the proposed D2D-assisted relaying framework, aiming to minimize the overall information loss rate, while taking into account the uncertainties in the communication latency. To this end, we first cast the data transmission scheduling problem as a two-stage stochastic programming problem and derive the solution. Then, we develop a real-time distributed data transmission scheduling scheme based on the sample path realizations. Extensive simulation results show significant performance improvement by using the proposed D2D-assisted relaying framework compared with two baseline frameworks for a variety of different cases.