A Cloud-Fog-Based Smart Grid Model for Efficient Resource Utilization

Abstract

Smart Grid (SG) is a modernized electric grid that enhances reliability, efficiency, sustainability, and economics of electricity services. Moreover, it plays a vital role in modern energy infrastructure. The SG core challenges are, how to efficiently utilize different kinds of front end smart devices, such as smart meters and power assets, and in what manner, to process an enormous volume of data received from these devices. Further, the cloud and fog computing is a technology that provides on demand computational resources. It is a good solution to overcome these hurdles, then it has numerous good characteristics such as cost saving, energy saving, scalability, flexibility, and agility. In this paper, a cloud-fog based model is proposed for resource management in SG. The key idea of our model is to figure-out a hierarchical structure of cloud-fog computing to provide different types of computing services for resource management in SG. In addition, for load balancing, three algorithms are used: throttled, round robin and particle swarm optimization. The comparative discussion of these algorithms are presented in this paper.