A fog-based internet of energy architecture for transactive energy management systems

Internet of Energy (IoE) is a subset of the Internet of Things which covers all aspects of electrical energy systems and provides secure connectivity and interoperability between power grid and Internet. In this paper, we present a fog-based IoE architecture for transactive energy (TE) management systems. The proposed design consists of three different layers. In the first tier, home gateways are employed which collect customers energy consumption data and provide necessary interface between customers and power grid. In the second layer, there are some local fog nodes located at the network edge and provide services with low latency. From the TE system point of view, the fog node act as retail energy market server which provides energy services to the end users. In the third layer, cloud servers are utilized to provide permanent and reliable data storage and high computing power. The proposed architecture supports different communication protocols such as hypertext transfer protocol, constrained application protocol, and OpenADR. We calculate the required bandwidth and delay performance of both fog- and cloud-based models. We present an optimal day ahead energy consumption schedule and an intercustomer energy trading mechanism for exchanging energy between end users. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated in terms of different power grid and communication network metrics. Results confirm the superiority of the proposed architecture.