Internet of Things Based Communication Architecture for Switchport Security and Energy Management in Interoperable Smart Microgrids

The unrelenting growth of present-day urbanization and its consequent burden on the utility grid, and insufficient conventional energy sources encourage demand-side energy management. This needs the deployment of local microgrids that uses renewable/alternative energy sources. Also, the present-day urban scenario is equipped with a combination of heterogeneous buildings (with different generation and load profiles) formed as community microgrids. So, there is a possibility of energy sharing among these buildings to cater for their electricity needs instead of depending on the utility grid all the time, thereby can reduce the utility grid burden. However, the interoperations of such microgrids require an effective architecture, which involves a three-layer (electrical, communication, and information technology (IT)) operation. Further, each of these layers has specific challenges to be addressed. So, a continuous evolution of architecture is highly desired to fruitfully address various operational issues for the establishment of interoperable smart microgrids. In this view, this paper proposes an Internet of Things-based communication architecture for developing interoperable microgrids in a locality. To effectively use the available energy sources, an energy management scheme is proposed, which can provide energy sharing among the microgrids. Further, switchport security aspects are studied and realized a three-mode security mechanism to identify and isolate unauthorised users in the network. The implementation of the proposed architecture is done using Cisco Packet Tracer by considering a case study. From the results, it is observed that the proposed architecture fruitfully established a security-enabled energy management system that can help for the growth of interoperable smart microgrids.