Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Recent work on ""green"" communication networks focused only on the reduction of their own energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. It is only very recently that research has begun to study the role of communication networks in adopting them also in other relevant sectors to enhance their efficiency of energy use, resulting in a dramatically increased overall carbon footprint reduction across multiple economic sectors. This research proposal aims at solving the problems and addressing the challenges arising from integrating the three different sectors of communications, energy, and transport to realize the future smart power grid. Today's power networks have to increase their utilization and become more efficient without depleting our ever declining natural resources to meet the increasing electric energy demand of a rapidly growing global population from 6.1 billion in 2000 to 7.5 billion by 2020, leading to a dramatic 75% increase in power consumption by 2020. The research proposal will focus on the design of sustainable and holistic fiber-wireless broadband access network solutions enhanced with advanced fiber optic and wireless sensors to unleash the full potential of next-generation power distribution networks. The resultant fiber-wireless access sensor networks and proposed communications paradigms will enable the support and control of decentralized renewable energy sources, electric mobility (e-mobility), and future power grid technologies such as smart microgrids, where power locally generated at residential premises can be shared among homes, thereby eliminating blackouts. Furthermore, the proposal aims at leveraging on lessons learned from the Internet and exploring innovative electric power network elements, which allow for an improved performance, survivability, and reliability of the power grid. The research proposal will also explore different pay-as-you-grow migration paths to implement the proposed smart grid communications infrastructure and will study business models that differ in terms of network ownership, network operation, and service provisioning in order to foster competition among network and service providers and thus drastically reduce costs.